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Full Idea
Our emotional capabilities are not fully open to be developed. …First, they are to some extent cognitively impenetrable. Secondly, they can ground certain sorts of weakness of will, or akrasia.
Clarification
'Cognitively impenetrable' means not changed by new knowledge
Gist of Idea
Emotions are not easily changed, as new knowledge makes little difference, and akrasia is possible
Source
Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 4 'Education')
Book Ref
Goldie,Peter: 'The Emotions' [OUP 2002], p.110
A Reaction
Education makes us more receptive to evidence. We could probably rate emotions on a scale indicating how easy they are to change. Jealousy seems tenacious. Most fears respond quickly to clear evidence.
| 23997 | Plato saw emotions and appetites as wild horses, in need of taming [Plato, by Goldie] |
| 1651 | Plato wanted to somehow control and purify the passions [Vlastos on Plato] |
| 5160 | There is a mean of feelings, as in our responses to the good or bad fortune of others [Aristotle] |
| 23913 | Nearly all the good and bad states of character are concerned with feelings [Aristotle] |
| 7832 | Stoics want to suppress emotions, but Spinoza overcomes them with higher emotions [Spinoza, by Stewart,M] |
| 4863 | An emotion comes more under our control in proportion to how well it is known to us [Spinoza] |
| 24009 | Moral education must involve learning about various types of feeling towards things [Williams,B] |
| 4909 | The only way we can control our emotions is by manipulating the outside world that influences them [Carter,R] |
| 23975 | Learning an evaluative property like 'dangerous' is also learning an emotion [Goldie] |
| 23983 | We call emotions 'passions' because they are not as controlled as we would like [Goldie] |
| 23999 | Emotional control is hard, but we are responsible for our emotions over long time periods [Goldie] |
| 23994 | Emotions are not easily changed, as new knowledge makes little difference, and akrasia is possible [Goldie] |
| 23998 | Emotional control is less concerned with emotional incidents, and more with emotional tendencies [Goldie] |