La natura delle emozioni: il dibattito tra Martha Nussbaum e Paul E. Griffiths

In this article we raise some doubts on Martha Nussbaum’s neo-Stoic version of the cognitive-evaluative approach to emotions. Following Paul E. Griffiths, who has powerfully argued against the theories that view emotions as evaluative judgments, we argue that the folk concept of emotion can be broken down into three different classes of psychological phenomena. In other words, the folk concept of emotion is not a natural kind: any promising investigation on the nature of emotions is required to start from here. We conclude that although Nussbaum’s theory falls short as a general theory of emotions, it may give an accurate account of some forms of sophisticated human emotionality.