Robert Solomon - True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions are Really Telling Us

IN MEMORIAM: ROBERT SOLOMON
Solomon was the author of more than 40 books, a gifted teacher and an expert in existentialism and emotions. He was born in 1942. He was Quincy Lee Centennial Professor of Business and Philosophy and a Distinguished Teaching Professor at UT Austin. He had a bachelor's degree in molecular biology and a master's and doctoral degree in philosophy and psychology.
"Six billion people in the world and counting ... nevertheless what you do counts."

Clip of Solomon in the animated film, "Waking Life" talking about existentialism. "Sartre once interviewed said he never really felt a day of despair in his life. But one thing that comes out from reading these guys is not a sense of anguish about life so much as a real kind of exuberance of feeling on top of it. It's like your life is yours to create..." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82EV4KBIsNk



Among Solomon's books: From Rationalism to Existentialism: The Existentialists and Their Nineteenth-Century Backgrounds (1972) arguably the best introductory text on existentialism in English, and The Passions (1976), considered a classic on the emotions.

From an ode to him on the Oxford University press blog. For the full article go HERE.

From the preface to Solomon’s most recent book, True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us:

I have always been fascinated by emotions; watching and dealing with them in other people, coping with and often joy-riding with my own. To be perfectly honest, I've also been terrified of them. As a child, I had a vile (though rarely violent) temper. As a young man, I fell in love often, and hard. As I matured, I learned to actually love, though perhaps more slowly and awkwardly than I would like to admit. And all along, I found myself brooding on, speculating about, luxuriating in, and terrified by my own emotional dispositions, responses, and preferences. I was already (although I did not know it at the time) a philosopher.

When I actually came into philosophy (from biology and medical school, where I had developed an interest in psychoanalysis), I brought with me that very personal fascination with the nature of the emotions ...

What were my emotions, my passions, or-more vaguely-my "feelings"? Did they, as it sometimes seemed, just happen to me-"sweep me away"-or even possess me, "take over my personality"? Or were they, as they also seemed to be, what was most me, most mine, what best (or worst) defined me? Were my emotions good and good for me, or were they bad and bad for me (as my less emotional friends would continually caution me)? What did it mean-that sixties' expression-to be "in touch with one's feelings"? What was it to be an "authentic" person? ...

Over the next thirty years, I explored those questions by way of philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and biology... I had long been indignant that emotions were so neglected in philosophy, the self-appointed discipline of "rationality." ...

...Now the philosophy of emotions, and the idea that reason and emotions are in cahoots rather than antagonists, is a major research area in psychology and the fast-advancing neurosciences.

Check out the other clips from "Waking Life: on youtube.com. Interesting.

R.I.P.