... LIMITS OF MEANING Arthur O. Lovejoy Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, The Johns Hopkins University Nearly thirty years ago Professor Singer ...

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

An examination of philosophical conclusions and psychological experimentation upon the nature of the emotions raises numerous complex and controversial problems. The terms employed, viz. “the life of feeling”, “instinct”, “imagination” and “emotion” are integral to epistemology, ethics and aesthetics. In epistemology, the teleological aspect of the emotions is of importance. In ethics, the Stoics gave impetus to the demand that the emotions be controlled, a demand that reached its culmination in the Kantian formalism. In aesthetics, the acceptance of the “sensuous (...) medium” as the material of art has implied “feeling” as its subjective counterpart. Yet, the full implications may not be drawn in these particular fields until analysis of the emotions themselves may relate these terms and give them precise and systematic definition. (shrink)