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No one contributed more to contemporary philosophical discussions of emotion that Bob Solomon. His seminal work in the 1970s helped set the agenda for decades to come, and the arguments he offered in those early works remain as relevant today as they were when they were originally penned. Those of us who came to this discussion in recent years revere Solomon as an intellectual hero. But many of us have also used him as a foil. As so often happens in academe, newcomers try to kill the father, and often then resurrect the grandfather as an alternative. In this case, the grandfather is William James. The last two decades have witnessed a Jamesian turn in emotion theory, and Solomon’s views are often seen as the polar opposite. Solomon authored some of the most penetrating critiques of the Jamesian approach, and his positive theory of the emotions often looks like a systematic inversion of James’s core tenets. As a Jamesian, this is how I’d seen things, and despite receiving unbelievably gracious support and encouragement from Solomon during my early forays, I’d thought of his work as more of a foil than a foundation. I realize now that this was a mistake. Many of Solomon’s most controversial views strike me as plausible now, not because James was wrong, but because there is room for a reconciliation. Solomon was a leading force in bringing together different disciplines (psychology, anthropology, and philosophy), different generations (historical and contemporary sources of influence), and different philosophical traditions (analytic and continental). It turns out that he was also prescient in seeing how the most ostensibly antithetical theories of emotion might find some common ground. This is the most important of many philosophical lessons I learned from him, not only because it is crucial for understanding emotions, but because it serves as a reminder, in this polarizing field, that the best solution to many of our debates is collaboration.

In what follows, I begin by presenting some of the central themes in Solomon’s theory of the emotions, focusing on his groundbreaking 1973 paper, but updating where appropriate. I indicate how these themes depart from the position advanced by James. Then, in the second part, I argue that the Jamesian should not reject Solomon’s arguments, but rather accommodate them, and I will suggest that his considered view can be regarded as integrative as well.

Solomon Contra James

In 1884, James published his first and most influential discussion of the emotions. There he defends a view that is sometimes called sensationalism. According to James, emotions are felt sensations of changes that take place in the body. When we experience an emotionally evocative event, our bodies prepare for a behavioral response, and the feeling of those preparations is the emotion. When we encounter a bear in the wilderness, to use a Jamesian paradigm case, our bodies prepare for flight, our hearts race, we perspire, and we get goose bumps (a vestige from hairier ancestors whose goose bumps caused hair to erect, giving rise to a larger appearance in the eyes of predators). The emotion of fear is a sensation comprising this somatic pattern.

James based this account on two central observations. The first is phenomenological. James asks readers to imagine an intense emotion, such as rage or terror, and then systematically subtract in our minds all its bodily symptoms. If we try this exercise, James says, we will find that there is nothing left that we would recognize as an emotion. The phenomenology of emotion is fundamentally bodily. The second observation is more or less empirical—it was speculative in James’s time but has since been tested and confirmed. When we change the configuration of our bodies, our emotions seem to change as well. James combated his own depression by adopting an erect posture and a smile, methods known now to enhance mood. If bodily changes can change our emotions, then, James concludes, emotions may be sensations of such changes. These arguments continue to persuade some contemporary emotion researchers and have been buffered by empirical work linking emotional responses to brain structures that are involved in the perception of bodily changes (Damasio 1994; Prinz 2004).

James’s theory of the emotions captivated philosophers and psychologists when it first appeared, and it became a dominant theory until 40 years later, when Walter Cannon (1927) authored an eviscerating critique. Cannon argued that emotions cannot be bodily sensations, because bodily nerves are too slow and insensitive to explain the immediacy and intensity of our emotional responses. He also argued that bodily responses cannot differentiate the emotions, and that stimulation of visceral nerves does not cause people to have experiences that they mistake for emotions, as James might have predicted. Solomon (1976) endorses this critique, which has often received inadequate attention by contemporary followers of James.

It should be noted, however, that the critique is less decisive than it may appear. First, some forms of bodily perception, such as heart rate, can be quite accurate and fast. Second, the fact that some visceral nerves are slow does not undermine the Jamesian theory, because emotions sometimes come on slowly, and because emotional experiences may begin as soon as the brain anticipates changes in the body, even if such changes have not yet taken place or been perceived. Third, the fact that stimulating an organ does not cause an emotional sensation can be explained by the fact that emotions involve whole patterns of bodily change. The stimulation of one organ alone would not suffice. This also speaks to the questions of differentiation. A rapid heart rate would not be enough to distinguish fear and euphoria, since both involve cardiovascular acceleration. But fear also characteristically involves a muscle tension (part of the freezing response), widened eyes, and tingling spine. And euphoria causes flushing rather than pallor, and the lips turn upward rather than down. Inducing such global patterns of change can indeed cause felt changes in the emotions. Indeed, facial expressions (Laird 1984; Zajonc et al. 1989) and respiratory changes (Philippot et al. 2002) may be enough to differentiate basic emotions. So the case against James cannot hang on Cannon’s critique. Solomon certainly wouldn’t make this mistake. His central objections to James have little to do with physiology. Rather, he defends a positive theory of his own, which seems to conflict with sensationalism in multiple ways.

Solomon’s approach to the emotions is inspired by Sartre rather than James. His overarching claim is that emotions are judgments, not sensations. James is a non-cognitivist. That is, he thinks cognitive states are unnecessary for emotions. An emotion can be triggered by a perceptual experience (seeing a bear), and consist in somatic sensations. A creature without thoughts could emote. For Solomon, emotions are fundamentally cognitive: they are judgments about states of affairs in the world, such as the judgment that the bear is dangerous. This can be called judgmentalism. Like James, Solomon cites phenomenological evidence. His paradigm case is anger, which he associates with the judgment that there has been an offense. He invites us to imagine being angry with no such judgment, and concludes that this impossible. It would be paradoxical, in a Moorian way, to say, “I am angry at you, but I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong.”

Solomon’s judgmentalism is welded to four other supporting planks, which further reveal his departures James. The first of these can be given the awkward name feeling contingentism. This is the view that emotions need not occur with any characteristic feelings. There is no feeling that is unique to anger and found in all instances of it. No feelings can be used to differentiate the emotions. Where James says that emotions are feelings, Solomon says that emotions need not even occur with feelings. One can be angry, he claims, without feeling angry.

Another plank of Solomon’s account can be called intentional essentialism. On this view, emotions have intentional objects, and they have them essentially. One cannot just be angry. One must be angry about something. Anger always has an object. This is an intentional object and not merely a cause. Anger might be caused by a bad day at work, but directed at something entirely different. The object of anger may not even be real. I may get angry at an offense that is merely imagined, perhaps because of that bad day at work. Like intentional objects in general, the objects of our emotions are opaque or subjective (what Solomon sometimes calls surreal). I may be frightened of Mr. Hyde, but not of Dr. Jekyll, even though they are one and the same person.

It is famously difficult for sensationalists to accommodate the fact that emotions represent, since we don’t usually think of sensations as having intentional objects; we don’t use that-clauses when ascribing tickles or twinges. Sensationalists sometimes respond by proposing that emotions are sensations plus representations of precipitating events. Solomon rejects this, saying that it doesn’t account for the non-separability of an emotion and his object. This non-separability cuts both ways. Solomon says that the fear of something cannot persist without its object, and the object too is presented as fearful. Thus, emotions do not consist of representations of cool facts appended to feelings, or even appended to evaluative judgments. Rather, those judgments permeate our way of experiencing their objects. This is an interesting thesis that has been neglected in the emotion literature, especially within cognitive science. Such non-separability is especially challenging for Jamesians, who explain emotional objects as representations that trigger felt bodily changes, rather than seeing such objects as inextricably bound to the emotions they evoke.

Solomon’s most provocative plank is intimated in the title of his 1973 paper: “Emotions and Choice.” For him, emotions are mental acts, and, as acts, they can be regarded as choices that we make, and for which we have responsibility. This can be called voluntarism about the emotions. Voluntarism is at odds with common sense; we think emotions are things that happen to us. But Solomon says we have agency over them. We fail to realize this because emotions are not consciously or deliberatively chosen. We are unaware of our complicity. Emotions are also urgent judgments, so we experience them in a way that makes them feel like they have taken hold of us, disrupting our normal activities. That is because emotions are responses to unusual circumstances. Swept up by the exigency of a situation, we fail to appreciate that emotions are in some sense voluntary. This view contrasts with the position of James who is a functionalist, in the psychological sense of that term. He sees emotions as ancient and automatic, evolved responses—bioprograms designed for coping with life’s challenges in a way that bypasses our more recent capacity for choice. Voluntarism is also at odds with sensationalism more broadly, since sensations are passive mental events. We don’t choose our chills and twinges.

The final plank that I will mention is closely related to voluntarism. Emotions have a strategic function. They fit in with our goals, and expressing them advances our purposes. Solomon explains this purposivism with an example. A man may get angry at his romantic partner over some trivial event in an effort to avoid going out with her on evening when he’d rather be watching television. The anger stirs up a fight, which makes an evening out unlikely, even though the anger is not about going out. In such cases, we are blind to the purposes of our emotions (or emotional expressions). If we realized these ulterior motives, the emotions would dissipate. But the fact that such motives exist can be explained by agentic nature of the passions, and would be deeply puzzling if emotions were merely involuntary sensations.

In all these ways, Solomon’s approach to the emotions contrasts sharply with James’s. On the face of it, his view systematically rejects sensationalism and all of its implications. Two views could hardly be more opposed. Or so it might seem. I now want to suggest that there is room for a reconciliation. Solomon’s views can be used to rehabilitate sensationalism, and such a rehabilitation is actually in line with his considered account of what emotions really are.

Towards a Sensational Judgmentalism

A diehard Jamesian might try to rebut Solomon by challenging the central tenets of his theory. This would be a courageous strategy, and perhaps even foolhardy. Solomon is a magnificent observer, and his discussions of the emotions are so rich, and so faithful to human life that it is hard to resist his conclusions without looking anemic. Jamesians are reductive; they try to find the most basic constituents of emotions. Solomon begins with emotions in their most florid, social, manifestations. If the Jamesian pleads for physiology without any resources for scaling up, the account will lose appeal. Jamesians should aspire to accommodate Solomon’s insights rather than treating emotions as reptilian responses that have no connection to the most sophisticated aspects of our psychology.

Toward this end, I want to revisit the planks of Solomon’s account to see whether they can be incorporated into a sensationalist framework. The resulting picture will, of necessity, depart from James, but it will preserve his emphasis on bodily sensations. The aim is to articulate a sensational judgmentalism.

Let’s begin with Solomon’s claim that emotions are judgments. On the face of it, judgments and sensations seem to be very different kinds of mental states. For Solomon, we cannot be angry without judging something to be offensive, and, for James, anger is a perception of a bodily preparation for action—presumably a preparation to aggress. One might try to bring these two together in a causal sequence. Perhaps judgments about offenses cause our bodies to change, and we feel the resulting perturbations. This would be a major concession for the Jamesian, since it would imply that emotions depend on cognitive states that are prior to bodily responses, and that would be one small step away from the view that the felt bodily responses are dispensable. But there is an alternative. One can say that the bodily feelings constitute a judgment.

Imagine that you experience an offense, whether real or imaginary. Some one might shout an obscenity at you, step on your toe without apology, show up late to your all-important meeting, or endorse a tax cut that you consider irresponsible. Immediately upon experiencing these acts, your body reacts; blood flows to your extremities, your heart races, your brow lowers, your fists clench. When you perceive this pattern of changes, your sensation can be described as representing your body, but this is not all it represents. Sensations always occur when the body undergoes a transformation, but they often also represent things that go beyond the body. For example, visual sensations depend on changes in the retina caused by light, but they also represent lions, lizards, and lounge chairs; likewise, auditory sensations depend on cochlear vibrations, but they inform us about creaks, cries, and crunches. Sensations use the body to tell us about the world, or our place in it. They do so with such immediacy and familiarity that we find it difficult to focus on the medium rather than the message. We say, “There’s a lion,” not “there’s a pattern of light reflecting off the lion’s surface onto my retina.”

From a psychosemantic perspective, sensations get their meaning from their usual causes and effects. The shape sensation caused by seeing a lion is similar to other sensations caused by lions, and is thus a reliable indicator that a lion is present. If you experience a sensation like that, you are probably in proximity to a lion or at least a picture of one. This sensation will also lead you to react in certain ways. You will draw inferences and make decisions. If you see the lion while hiking in the wilderness, you might choose to take flight, but a similar experience in a zoo will promote approach behaviors rather than avoidance. Your sensation represents the lion because it is of a type that generally has lions as causes and leads to lion-relevant effects. In a similar way, if you experience your body preparing for aggression, then chances are you have encountered something offensive, and the experience of such a sensation may lead you to respond aggressively, if retaliation seems feasible, or to bite your tongue, if you think retaliation would make things worse. In that way, your bodily sensation represents offensiveness—it is of a type that has offensiveness as a usual cause, and it leads to offense-relevant effects. One can say that the bodily sensation is a kind of judgment. It is a psychological state with the semantic content: there has been an offense. I call this the embodied appraisal theory of emotions (Prinz 2004).

This suggests that emotions can be sensations and judgments at the same time, a major step towards reconciling Solomon and James. But the next tenet of Solomon’s theory may seem impossible to accommodate by the Jamesian: feeling contingentism. That is the view that emotions are not necessarily felt. One can be angry without feeling angry. On the face of it, this is a direct contradiction of sensationalism. James says that emotions are feelings, and that implies that they are essentially felt. There is, however, another interpretation. It is important to recall that sensations are perceptual states. They are episodes in our sensory input systems. An emotion, for James, is a complex interoceptive state. Within perceptual psychology, it is axiomatic that perception can occur below the threshold of consciousness. This is the case in subliminal vision, for example. Equating feelings with conscious episodes, then, we can say that sensations can occur unfelt. An unfelt sensation is one of which we are not conscious. Since sensations can, in general, occur without consciousness, it follows that there can be unfelt emotions, even if emotions are sensations. Those would be perceptions of bodily changes that do not make it into consciousness.

Indeed, it is fairly easy to see how this might occur. Consciousness depends on attention (Prinz 2012). One can undergo a bodily change without attending to it. This may be especially common in the case of emotions, because we tend, when emoting, to focus on the object of the emotion, rather than the emotion itself. If frightened by a sound at night, for example, we focus intently on the source of the sound, not on the racing heart. In this case, I may even know that I am afraid, while at the same time not feeling my fear, just as an athlete might surmise that her body is in pain, while not feeling this pain, because she is too focused on her strides towards victory. It follows that emotions can go unfelt and this may be relatively common.

What then of James’s claim that emotions are feelings? In a sense, James is still right. After all, when emotions are felt, the feelings are the emotions; it is just that James did not appreciate the fact that emotions can occur unconsciously. Thus, one can accept James’s equation of emotions and feelings while embracing Solomon’s thesis that feelings are contingent, as paradoxical as this might sound (Prinz 2005).

Turn next to Solomon’s intentional essentialism, the view that emotions have their objects essentially, and that there is a sense in which the object, too, is inseparable from the emotion. In my own work on the emotions, I have said too little about intentional objects, which have always been at the center of Solomon’s discussions. The embodied appraisal approach entails that emotions represent things, such as offenses and losses and dangers; but how do they come to represent specific things, such as the offensiveness of a pundit’s diatribe, or the loss of a friend, or the (surreal) danger of flying? My own thinking about this has invoked counterfactuals. An emotion represents its particular object if the emotion would not have occurred had that object not been represented. This trivially accommodates one aspect of intentional essentialism. If the emotion depends counterfactually on (the representation of) its intentional object, then any given emotion has its object essentially. Contra Solomon, I think an emotion can linger after one stops thinking about its object, but such lingering feelings might best be called moods, and Solomon (1973) is agnostic about the relationship between moods and intentional objects. So there is clearly room for intentionally essentialist sensationalism.

So far, however, this story doesn’t capture Solomon’s deep observation that the essential link between emotion and object cuts both ways. For even if I could not have had a particular emotion without its object, it does not follow that I cannot have represented that object without the emotion. In fact, on the story just suggested, the object representation precedes the emotion and is, to that extent, independent of it. This presents a predicament for the Jamesian. Either the object cannot precede the emotion, in which case the counterfactual strategy for explaining intentional essentialism will fail, or the object cannot be dependent on the emotion, in which case Solomon’s deep insight will go unmet.

To accommodate Solomon’s insight, I think the Jamesian should say that the object that precipitates an emotional response is transformed once that response is initiated. Following Solomon, one might even invoke Sartre’s notion of magic here (invoked in the latter’s claim that emotions are “magical transformations of the world”). The object may begin as neutrally represented before the emotion begins, but then it is magically transformed by the emotion, becoming hot, rather than cold. We project our emotions onto the world. We see things as offensive, dangerous, and tragic, even though these properties do not exist objectively out there, but depend instead on our responses.

But what is it to see something as offense? How does affect infuse object? These questions are challenging for the Jamesian, because emotions are bodily sensations, and representations of objects are usually not somatic. How can a bodily state infuse a disembodied representation? To answer this question, we need to involve a pair of phenomena that have been neglected by Jamesians. First of all, emotions usher in changes in how we process information, including patterns of attention and cognitive styles. In joy we experience the world holistically. In fear attention becomes highly acute. In despair we are inundated by negative thoughts about the future. Thus the way an object is represented can change depending on what emotion we are experiencing, and those changes may explain one sense in which objects depend on emotions. These changes are not sensational, nor are they judgmental. Both judgmentalists and sensationalist need to explain their theories by recognizing that emotions are not merely states, but ways of seeing.

The second aspect of affect infusion is more Jamesian. When the body undergoes changes, those changes are object-specific. When enraged we don’t simply form a generalized disposition to aggress. Rather our bodies militate against a specific offender. Correlatively, once the emotion sets in, the offended takes on what J. J. Gibson called an affordance. In perceiving or reflecting on the offender we register the action that we are inclined to take. Think about the experience of a friend as huggable, or a delicious food as demanding to be devoured. These behavioral responses are not experienced as after-effects—something above and beyond the perception of friend and food. Rather we perceive the affordances as properties of the objects that afford them. We project our bodies onto the world. This move is Jamesian in nature, but it has been missed because Jamesians tend to ignore intentional objects. Solomon’s focus on objects, and his ideas about subjective or magical transformations, point towards an enriched sensationalism. And this enrichment further narrows the gap between the sensational approach and the idea that emotions are ways of construing the world.

We can turn now to the most controversial aspect of Solomon’s account, one that most cognitivists would probably reject: the idea that emotions are voluntary choices. In an appendix to “Emotions and Choice,” Solomon (1980) weakens his voluntarism a bit, saying that he moved too quickly in his early formulations from the view that emotions are actions to the conclusion that emotions are chosen. Solomon also notes that culture exerts a strong influence on emotions, which seems to count against emotions being chosen, since that is an external influence. It might also be added that judgments are not always chosen. They are often passive responses to situations that present themselves. In fact, whether we can ever simply choose to judge something is controversial. If you don’t think the moon is made of cheese, you cannot simply judge that it is.

For all that, I think there is something importantly right about Solomon’s early voluntarism—something that the Jamesian should accommodate. Emotions can come unbidden, but we can also play an active role in changing emotional attitudes. For example, we can reconstrue life events. A loss that may be experienced with great sadness may also be an opportunity to reflect, reprioritize and renew. An offense may actually be sign that you have done something that hurt the offending party’s feelings. A danger may also be a challenge through which one can grow. The contours of an emotion can change, when we reconstrue, and in some cases, one sentiment can give way to another. Whenever we have an emotion, there is an element of choice in so far as we can choose to acquiesce or we can look for ways to change perspective.

Even the decision to stay with an emotion, like Sisyphus and his rock, can be thought of as voluntary. Sisyphus could not do otherwise, but he could choose to identify with his activity, making his life his own, and overcoming alienation. We sometimes think of emotions as things that happen to us, like invasive forces. We feel stressed by work, and we suffer from depressive disorders. Instead, we can acknowledge that we thrive on stress and that we feel at home in our gloom. We might find those who lead stress-free lives dull, and those who are not depressed myopic. Embracing these pathologized sentiments is always an option when opting out fails.

Given the link between choice and construal, voluntarism may seem difficult to square with sensationalism. Construal is a very cognitive activity. We don’t think of construal as impacting perception. I cannot reconstrue that green tomato as red, and thereby see it as ripe. On the other hand, there is a way of reconstruing that is very familiar in perceptual psychology. We can reconstrue by shifting attention. We cannot see green as red, in this way—there are constraints—but we can see a duck-rabbit as fuzzy or fowl. Ambiguous inputs are amenable to attentional alteration. The sting of the cold can be seen as painful or exhilarating by focusing on different aspects of our somatic response (the adrenal lift or the agonized grimace). Jamesians should not deny that cognitive construals can influence our emotions, but they can also insist that some construals are perceptual. By staring out of the air plane window and seeing the distant ground below, the phobic may exacerbate fear. But one can also stare at the beautiful clouds or feel the stability of the chair or the music in one’s headphones. Perception is not passive. We chose where to look. Consequently, emotional voluntarism is not incompatible with sensationalism.

This brings us, at last, to purposivism. Can sensations be strategic? In his Appendix, Solomon (1980) notes that his (1973) discussion of purposes conflated emotions and their expressions. His example of the man who gets angry to avoid going out, might better be described as a man who expresses anger to avoid going out. After all, had the emotion gone unexpressed, it would not have the desired effect. This adds a complication for standard forms of judgmentalism, since expression and emotion are divorced. If emotions are ordinary judgments, they can occur without changes in the body, and can thus easily exist without being expressed. For the Jamesian, expression and emotion are linked. Since emotions are bodily sensations, they will usually be accompanied by bodily changes, including expressions. Emotions will be perceivable to others, in posture, face, and vocal intonation. It would take effort to conceal anger. Since the body is perceivable, it follows that emotions convey information to others; they are fundamentally, even if unwittingly, communicative. They are fundamentally social. This fits well with the strategic view of emotions. Bodily changes serve a dual function. They prepare us for action, but they also indicate to others that we are so prepared. We bear our teeth, we cower, and we stare lustfully. Every smile is a welcome sign, and every tear a supplication. Since these communicative displays influence others, emotions cannot be understood without taking their social impact seriously. The question, “Why did you feel X?” is often best answered by asking what effect you wanted to have on another person. It is unsurprising that the unconscious mechanisms that determine when we feel doomed or delighted take this into account, and the likelihood of an emotional episode may depend on the extent to which its expression will advance our ends. This Solomonian insight invites a Jamesian implementation.

In summary, the major planks of Solomon’s judgmentalism can be accommodated within a Jamesian framework. The resulting sensational judgmentalism differs from James’s own account (he failed to emphasize the meaning of emotions), but it preserves the idea that emotions are sensations of bodily changes. They are that, but also much more. Solomon’s account can be seen as a set of desiderata that any theory must meet. These may look incompatible with the Jamesian approach, but there is room for a reconciliation.

Solomon’s Wisdom

By way of conclusion, I want to suggest that the hybrid I have been describing may not be far from Solomon’s own considered account of the emotions. As a newcomer to emotion research, I was inclined to interpret Solomon as the archrival of James. That impression was fuelled by Solomon’s explicit critiques of the standard sensationalist program, but also by a prejudice I brought with me in thinking about the nature of judgments. Trained in contemporary philosophy of mind, I had come to think that anyone who talks about judgments must be imaging something like sentences in a language of thought. On prevailing views, a judgment is a sentence in the head. So, on reading his claim that emotions are judgments, I assumed that Solomon must have a sentential view about the passions, a view that I found difficult to digest. But this impression was based on a mistake. The sentential theory of thought was not the default for Solomon, who was coming out of the continental tradition. Heidegger compares thinking to building, and Merleau-Ponty tries to collapse the distinctions between thinking and perceiving, and between perceiving and acting. It is therefore a mistake to assume that Solomon’s account is incompatible with an embodied view of the emotions simply because he equates emotions with judgments.

This possibility—that emotional judgments might be embodied—is already intimated in some of Solomon’s early work. Though he criticized James in his 1973 and 1976 discussions, his return to these themes in 1980 underscores the fact that emotional judgments are judgments of personal concern (Solomon 1973, 1976, 1980). The recognition of an offense that characterizes anger is not to be understood as the judgment, “What he said to me was offensive,” but rather as the exclamation, “He offended me!” Here already, then, we see Solomon emphasizing that emotions are judgments of a special kind. They have heat, urgency, and a connection to the self that is distinctive. In thinking about the self here, one brings to mind Sartre’s prereflective self-consciousness, not the symbolically mediated consciousness that underwrites explicit self-ascription. Or, perhaps, we might think of Merleau-Ponty, who insists that the self is the body. To recognize offensiveness in this personal way is to see it in some prereflective way as a concern for the embodied self.

Solomon’s move toward embodiment culminates in his later discussions of the emotions, most explicitly in his 2003 re-visitation of the judgmentalist position (Solomon 2003). There, he likens the judgments that constitute emotions to embodied skills, citing both Merleau-Ponty and Ryle. He offers kinesthetic judgments as an analogy. When ascending a stairwell, the body judges the position of the next step. Most strikingly, he suggests that emotions may involve “judgments of the body,” a term that anticipates the notion of embodied appraisals. Solomon humbly acknowledges that the body was underemphasized in his early explorations of passion, but he importantly keeps the core tenets of those early views intact. He does not abandon his judgmentalism, but rather fleshes it out, quite literally. The early work says little about what judgments are, and here, in his most considered treatment, we find Solomon saying that emotional judgments are somatic in nature. In other words, Solomon had arrived at something very much like the rapprochement that I have recommended here.

In late November 2006, I had the privilege of staging a public “debate” about the emotions with Solomon at the University of Pennsylvania, in his former hometown, Philadelphia. I came expecting a battle. I nervously anticipated a head-to-head clash with one of the most sophisticated cognitivists in the world, someone who had thought about the emotions for decades, a sine qua non for all of us in the field. I thought I might stand up for James, but also anticipated some bruising, and I was confident I would learn a lot. The last of these predictions was true, but I was wrong to expect a fight. As we conversed in that public setting, the differences between James and Solomon seemed to evaporate, and that was not because Solomon offered any concessions. He was not one to shy away or back down. Rather, it was because his theory did not match the caricature I had sketched in my mind. Under Solomon’s influence, I was prepared to admit that James underestimated the intelligence of emotions, and Solomon had long appreciated that standard cognitivism underestimated the body. There in Philadelphia, these two titans of emotion theory, Solomon and James, found common ground. I came to be a mouthpiece for James, but that was unnecessary, for Solomon had already incorporated the body, and he had theorized how we might think with our hearts. I learned other things from Solomon that weekend, about art and life, and about humility. I saw an intellectual hero as a human being then, and even grander and more heroic in that capacity.