Emotional Meanings of Good and Pleasant

This project will be somewhat of an experiment. Given that my overall concern is sentimentalist moral content in literature, namely narratives, I thought “why not do the kind of philosophy that many philosophers are beginning to recognize in literature and narratives”?

It begins this way. Philosophy is well known for its examples; the trolley problem, the ship of Theseus, Plato’s Republic, you know, the philosopher kings and their strange rituals etc. It is likely that this is where all of the philosophy happens, in the examples.

But these are just little stories. However, they’ve been thinned out quite a bit. This is presumably so that we will focus on what is truly important. However, it seems that in doing so, we are missing what is truly important in moral concerns, our emotions. Our little stories do not affect us emotionally as they would out there in the real world. Hence, narratives are better for getting down to the nitty gritty. For some examples, see, and.

This project will focus on the philosophical examples often found in the literature, but will do so in a more expansive way, attempting to present these examples in the full form of narrative.