ABSTRACT
Emotions are of course responsive to reason, not only in the familiar case in which a change of belief initiates or terminates an emotion. Emotion could have been an invitation to talk about the scale between coldness and Stoicism on the one hand and excitable sensibility and Romanticism on the other. It could have been an invitation to contrast and compare what Rae Langton calls the sane Kant versus the severe Kant. Rationalism, perceiving that emotions are, in fact, respectable, seeks to colonize them rather than to war with them. This rationalist imperialism may mainly be a topic for the social historian. Clearly the Western tradition from Descartes onwards includes rich deposits of mistrust of anything emotional or passionate. There is a more respectable place in which cognition may be involved with emotion. The virtuous person is, so far as his or her virtue is concerned, exactly as emotional as the rest of us.
