[MD] Doug Renselle & Language

[Krimel]

[Matt]
...you might check out 
Martha Nussbaum's Upheavals of Thought if you haven't already 
run into it.  She's part classicist, part philosopher, part 
all-around-know-it-all, and that book is a major entry into 
rethinking the emotions, and she spends some time on the 
centrality of narrative to growth and whatnot.

[Krimel]
Finally got around to looking that up on Amazon. I may buy it, but at 700+
pages it will be a while before I get around to reading it... I have heard
Robert Solomon expound on the intelligence of emotions. Howard Gardner
includes a couple of affective categories among his multiple intelligence
and Daniel Goleman has seized on two of them in his writing about emotional
intelligence.

Since emotions have mainly been seen as irrational, intelligence is a good
term. Rational implies rule governed and surely the emotions aren't that.
But intelligent in the sense of heuristically on target is pretty good.
Pretty good is good enough in evolution. Breeding in a sense of what will
help and what will harm you seems fundamental in Darwin's world. Natures'
strategy of shifting distributions of traits through time favors a good
heuristic.

My early take on narrative is that it is a strategy for imposing sequence on
our random access memory. But that could just be the inner geek talking.