All of us want to be happy and live well. Sometimes intense emotions affect our happiness—and, in turn, our moral lives. Our emotions can have a significant impact on our perceptions of reality, the choices we make, and the ways in which we interact with others. Can we, as moral agents, have an effect on our emotions? Do we have any choice when it comes to our emotions?

In Aquinas on the Emotions, Diana Fritz Cates shows how emotions are composed as embodied mental states. She identifies various factors, including religious beliefs, intuitions, images, and questions that can affect the formation and the course of a person's emotions. She attends to the appetitive as well as the cognitive dimension of emotion, both of which Aquinas interprets with flexibility. The result is a powerful study of Aquinas that is also a resource for readers who want to understand and cultivate the emotional dimension of their lives.

Diana Fritz Cates is an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Choosing to Feel: Virtue, Friendship, and Compassion for Friends and coeditor of Medicine and the Ethics of Care.

Introduction 1. Religious Ethics

2.Religious Ethics and the Study of Emotion

3. Approaching Aquinas on the Emotions (I)

4. Approaching Aquinas on the Emotion (II)

5. Approaching the Human Sensory Appetite from Below (I)

6. Approaching the Human Sensory Appetite from Below (II)

7. Approaching the Human Sensory Appetite from Above (I)

8. Approaching the Human Sensory Appetite from Above (II)

9. The Formation of Distinctively Human Emotions

10. The Religious-Ethical Study of Emotion

Appendix: Aquinas on the Powers of Capabilities of a Human Being (Relevant Selections)

Bibliography

Index