2025.03.1 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Stephen Darwall, The Heart & Its Attitudes, Oxford University Press, 2024, 195pp., $40.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780198879565.
Reviewed by Michelle Mason Bizri, University of Minnesota
“Philosophers don’t often write about the heart,” Stephen Darwall begins in The Heart & Its Attitudes, “At least, analytical philosophers don’t” (1). In taking up “matters of the heart,” Darwall means to consider our mutual emotional vulnerabilities and the attitudes that mediate our personal and social relationships. His journey leads the reader through ten chapters: an introductory first chapter followed by nine chapters that might also stand as independent essays. The latter cover the significance of appeals to love (versus respect) in Frederick Douglass’s and James Baldwin’s discussions of race relations (Chapter 2); the commonalities and distinctions between “attitudes of the will” and “attitudes of the heart” as two species of reactive attitudes (Chapter 3); the differences between guilt vs. remorse and moral indignation vs. personal…
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