This blog is dedicated to making use of my PhD dissertation in philosophy, "Anger Et Cetera: Understanding the Emotions in Ethics". I defended it on 13 May, 2009 and have spent the time since then contemplating what to do with my research. I considered trying to get it published as-is, but its not highly likely, nor is it very useful to anyone. People rarely read academic texts.
Instead I want to 'translate' it from 'academese' into plain English. I hope this will allow all the thinking and research I put into my dissertation to be of use to society. If it goes well, I think I'll turn it into a book that I could shop to a mass-market publisher.
I envision my material provoking you into thinking about the emotions; what they are, how they work, how they work to create what you consider right and wrong, how they affect your decisions and actions. But most importantly, I want to show you how we can use the emotions to move beyond the pernicious pull of moral relativism and defend a moral realism. For those of you who don't know, moral realism is at bottom the belief that some moral claims are actually true for everyone.
I hope that if you do get provoked, you'll do me the courtesy of sharing your thoughts in the comments area.
I expect comments to be courteous to me and any other commenters. I reserve the right to deny or delete any comments for any reason. And I reserve my copyright to all that I publish here. Any photos, video or artwork that I publish I assume to be freely available and will take down if the owner requests.
Thanks for checking out my blog,
Damien
