Search

This paper addresses the question of the relations between emotions and personhood, with a view to advancing a critical realist account of the role of emotions in social life. It is argued that the constitution of persons has to be approached from an ontological perspective, and that this raises questions about how sociology has addressed the meaning and role of emotions. Margaret Archer's critical realist perspective on them as commentaries on human concerns is broadly endorsed, but some significant correctives are proposed, especially with respect to the important distinction between primary and secondary emotions. To this end, it is argued that the affect spectrum theory advanced by Warren TenHouten can be fruitfully appended to a critical realist theory of emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often assumed that social and political thought have nothing to do with issues of concern to metaphysicians. I have referred to this assumption in the past as The Myth of Metaphysical Neutrality. I argue here that social and political theories have metaphysical positions built into them, such that to adopt a given social or political account commits one to that theory's implicit metaphysics ‐‐ and, conversely, that commitment to a given metaphysical position will preclude adopting social or political accounts that are at odds with it. I look first at the issue of emergence, showing that key concepts employed by Aristotle, Rousseau and Marx, respectively, require a belief that wholes do not reduce to their parts. I then turn to Marx's account of alienation, arguing that it presupposes a belief in agent‐causal free will. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]