The thesis that emotions are, at their core, cognitive judgments — evaluative assessments of what is good, bad, threatening, or appropriate — has its most systematic ancient advocate in Stoic philosophy and its most rigorous modern rehabilitator in Martha Nussbaum. Within the depth-psychology corpus, the doctrine is treated neither as settled orthodoxy nor as simple error but as a generative tension whose resolution determines the scope and limits of therapeutic intervention. Sorabji provides the most nuanced historical cartography: Chrysippus held that emotions just are value judgments (or their immediate sequelae), a claim that grounds the Stoic program of cognitive therapy but founders against counter-examples — phobias, musically induced affect, shell shock — where the amygdala proves impervious to cortical revision. Graver traces how Zeno and Chrysippus distinguished judgments as sufficient but not necessary conditions for emotional movements, a refinement ignored by critics who assimilate the position to simple intellectualism. Nussbaum, working from Aristotle and the Stoics, argues that emotions are judgments of eudaimonistic value, making them simultaneously rational, assessable, and morally significant. Konstan situates Aristotle’s own contribution differently: for Aristotle, emotions are partly defined by their capacity to alter judgment rather than by being identical to judgment, a distinction with significant consequences for rhetoric, ethics, and literary theory. The corpus thus holds in productive tension a strong cognitivist thesis, its Posidonian and modern neurological critics, and Aristotle’s more functionalist alternative.
One issue, which is still a subject of the latest research, is whether emotions are, and should be treated as, mental judgements and attitudes, as the main Stoic t
Sorabji identifies the question of whether emotions are essentially mental judgments as the organizing problem of ancient emotion theory, with the Stoics as its principal advocates.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000thesis
in time, however, all emotions will turn out to consist of judgements and all will be amenable to cognitive therapy.
Sorabji articulates the strong Chrysippan claim that emotions are constitutively judgments, which makes them in principle fully accessible to cognitive-therapeutic intervention.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000thesis
The Stoics, as we shall see, claim that the relation is one of identity: the emotion just is a certain sort of belief or judgment.
Nussbaum states the Stoic identity thesis — emotion is identical to a type of belief or judgment — as the strongest position within the spectrum of cognitivist accounts running from Plato onward.
, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994thesis
The Stoics’ analysis of emotions as value judgments, however, is independent of their controversial normative
Nussbaum underscores that the Stoic cognitive-judgment analysis of emotion stands analytically apart from the Stoics’ contested normative conclusions about how one ought to live.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis
it is not only the emotions which consist in the judgments and opinions which I have mentioned, but also the things brought about by emotions.
Graver, drawing on Cicero’s Stoic report, distinguishes emotions as constituted by judgments from the psychophysical events those judgments causally produce — a refinement crucial to avoiding a naive intellectualism.
, Stoicism and Emotion, 2007thesis
the judgments involved in emotion are sufficient conditions for the corresponding psychophysical changes, but not that they are necessary conditions.
Graver clarifies the Zenonian-Chrysippan position: cognitive judgments are sufficient but not necessary for emotional movements, which allows for non-judgmental affect without conceding the full cognitivist claim.
, Stoicism and Emotion, 2007thesis
investigators in several disciplines have increasingly recognized that emotions typically, and perhaps necessarily, involve a substantial cognitive component. The traditional opposition between reason and emotion is no longer the reigning paradigm
Konstan surveys the contemporary scholarly consensus that emotions involve substantial cognitive elements, marking the collapse of the reason-versus-emotion dichotomy as a reigning paradigm.
, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, 2006thesis
neo-Stoic/ Nussbaum writes, ‘claims that grief is identical with the acceptance of a proposition that is both evaluative and eudaimonistic, that is, concerned with one or more of the person’s important goals and ends’
Konstan reports Nussbaum’s neo-Stoic formulation that grief — and by extension any emotion — just is the assent to an evaluative, eudaimonistically weighted proposition.
, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, 2006supporting
These examples involve merely feeling as if the value judgements were right, while knowing that they are wrong.
Sorabji presents counter-examples — phobias, fear of flying — in which emotional experience persists despite the agent’s intellectual rejection of the relevant value judgment, challenging the sufficiency of the Chrysippan identity thesis.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
Disowning the judgement that a height is dangerous does not automatically calm the amygdala. Lower animals may react only through the amygdala, not through the cortex.
Sorabji marshals neuroscientific evidence from LeDoux to demonstrate that the amygdala can generate emotional responses independently of cortical judgment, constituting a structural counter-example to Stoic cognitive monism.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
he evidently defined them as being contractions and expansions on the occasion of (fresh) judgements of evil and good. Only once, by a form of shorthand, does he define distress as a belief, rather than the result of belief.
Sorabji distinguishes Zeno’s causal model — in which judgments occasion emotional contractions and expansions — from the shorthand identity formulation, showing that even within early Stoicism the judgment-emotion relation admitted of more than one reading.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
the emotional movements are causally sufficient for emotion, without judgements being needed
Sorabji, reconstructing Posidonius via Galen, argues that in non-human animals (and possibly children) emotional movements are causally sufficient for emotion without requiring cognitive judgment, directly contesting Chrysippus.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
trying to define emotion as a judgement of goodness and badness, coupled with a desire to react, rather than with a judgement approving reaction.
Sorabji examines the possibility of defining emotion as a compound of evaluative judgment and desire, ultimately finding this insufficient as a general account because desire does not invariably accompany emotional states.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
Aristotle’s view that ‘we do not deliver judgments in the same way when we are grieving and rejoicing, or loving and hating’
Konstan highlights Aristotle’s distinctive claim that emotions alter the character of subsequent judgments, positioning emotions as modulators of cognition rather than as straightforwardly identical to cognitive acts.
, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, 2006supporting
Beliefs, on their view, are relegated to a separate category: they impact on emotions as do emotions on beliefs, but they are not constitutive of emotion.
Konstan articulates a position contrasted with the Stoic identity thesis, in which beliefs causally influence emotions without being constitutive of them, thereby preserving a distinction between cognitive and affective dimensions.
, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, 2006supporting
although he would be right to judge his situation bad, he would be wrong if, like Alcibiades, he added the second judgement, that inner sinkings would be an appropriate reaction.
Sorabji reconstructs Chrysippus’s two-judgment structure — a first evaluative judgment and a second judgment of appropriate reaction — showing that full-blown emotion requires both cognitive operations.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
some bear a striking resemblance to points raised by modern theorists of emotion against the cognitivist analyses of Richard Lazarus and others.
Graver draws a parallel between Posidonian objections to Chrysippan cognitivism and contemporary philosophical challenges to cognitivist theories of emotion, suggesting that the ancient debate anticipates modern disputes.
, Stoicism and Emotion, 2007supporting
LeDoux recognizes that emotions have an important cognitive dimension, but he maintains that ‘[t]he perceptual representation of an object and the evaluation of an object are separately processed in the brain’
Konstan invokes LeDoux’s neuroscience to argue that while emotions have a cognitive dimension, perceptual representation and evaluative processing are neurologically dissociable, complicating any simple identity of emotion and judgment.
, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, 2006supporting
although I believe Posidonius is right to cite wordless music, because it does provide examples of emotion aroused without judgement, his own example is not the right one to show this.
Sorabji agrees with Posidonius that wordless music can arouse emotion without judgment, furnishing a counterexample to the strict cognitivist position while carefully adjudicating which of Posidonius’s own examples succeed.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
emotions tend to be self-validating because they can affect beliefs in such a way as to reproduce and strengthen the judgment that constituted the original stimulus to the emotion, thus generating a closed or circular cognitive system.
Konstan describes a recursive dynamic in which emotional states reinforce the very cognitive judgments that generated them, revealing the bidirectional and self-entrenching relationship between emotion and cognition.
, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature, 2006supporting
Posidonius agrees with Chrysippus that, at least standardly in adult humans, emotions involve judgements. He is against our living our whole life in accordance with emotion
Sorabji argues that Posidonius, despite his critique of Chrysippus, nonetheless accepts that in adult humans emotions standardly involve judgments, locating their disagreement at the level of causal sufficiency rather than cognitive involvement.
, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 2000supporting
The abnormally high rate of utilitarian judgments observed in frontal brain-injured patients with deficits in emotional response suggests that their decisions are mostly cognitive, intentional and conscious, unaided by emotion.
McGilchrist marshals neuropsychological evidence that removing emotional contribution shifts moral judgment toward cold cognition, implying that normal judgment is partly constituted by emotional processing rather than being independent of it.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
The abnormally high rate of utilitarian judgments observed in frontal brain-injured patients with deficits in emotional response suggests that their decisions are mostly cognitive, intentional and conscious, unaided by emotion.
McGilchrist’s neuropsychological evidence reinforces that intact emotional response is a constitutive component of ordinary moral and evaluative judgment, contradicting any strict partition between emotion and cognition.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
aesthetic emotions were attributed the power to evaluate, in a largely intuitive way, phenomena that by definition partially defy a strictly conceptual derivation
Menninghaus, following Baumgarten and Kant, treats aesthetic emotions as evaluative faculties operating below full conceptual articulation, an aside that qualifies the scope of the cognitive-judgment thesis in aesthetic contexts.
, What Are Aesthetic Emotions?, 2015aside
The Stoic approach to action thus classifies the responses of the animate being according to the intentional characteristics of psychic events rather than by the expression of those events in observable behavior.
Graver situates Stoic emotion theory within a broader intentionalist psychology of action, contextualizing why for the Stoics judgment — as an intentional psychic event — is the natural locus for defining emotion.
, Stoicism and Emotion, 2007aside