Life is a sequence of emotional states. But what are emotions and why are they so important to us? In one of the most extensive investigations of the emotions ever published, Robert Roberts develops a novel conception of what emotions are and then applies it to a large range of types of emotion and related phenomena. Aimed principally at philosophers and psychologists, this book will certainly be accessible to readers in other disciplines such as religion and anthropology.

Robert C. Roberts extends to the moral life the account of emotions presented in his Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (2003), that they are concern-based construals. In this book the author explains how emotions can be a basis for moral judgments, how they account for the deeper moral identity of actions we perform, how they are constitutive of morally valenced personal relationships like friendship, enmity, collegiality and parenthood, and how both pleasant and unpleasant emotions interact with our personal wellbeing (eudaimonia). He argues that none of these dimensions of...