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Alex Wellington, On Emotions: Philosophical Essays, The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 66, Issue 265, October 2016, Pages 892–895, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqv104
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The genesis of this collection of essays, edited by John Deigh, was in the 2008 Royal Conference on Ethics at the University of Texas at Austin. All but two chapters are original to the book. That conference was one of many held in honour of Robert Solomon. It focused on Robert Solomon's hugely impactful contributions to philosophy of emotions, while other conferences gave recognition to his influential contributions to a remarkably diverse range of other areas, including aesthetics, business ethics, comparative philosophy, and Nietzsche studies. Another volume edited by Kathleen Higgins and David Sherman, titled Passion, Death and Spirituality, contains papers showcasing Solomon's work in other areas.
As John Deigh makes abundantly clear (in the Introduction), the respect due to emotions as a worthy topic of philosophical analysis was a long time coming. Professor Solomon's breakthrough book (The Passions: The Myth and Nature of Human Emotion) was instigation and stimulus to what is now an exceptionally vibrant and flourishing area of philosophical inquiry. Four themes prominent in philosophy of emotion, and well represented in this collection, are as follows: (i) Thought—conceptualization of emotion as thought; (ii) Science—considerations of the adequacy of theories of emotion familiar from experimental psychology and other empirical endeavours; (iii) Art—exemplification of emotional resonance through the arts (such as literature, music, theatre, opera, film, or comedy); (iv) Morality and Virtue—exploration of linkages between emotions, virtues, and moral responsibility. The chapters of the book could fruitfully be clustered according to those overlapping themes, as suggested in a brief overview of the contents provided by the editor. (A minor quibble about the Introduction, which is otherwise a very fine interpretive essay, is that the discussion providing a road map to the book, outlining the selections and connections between them, seems unduly abbreviated.)
