Graduate Student Talk Series _ Julia Stubbs

“Doing Before Feeling”

There is a common saying: you can't control how you feel, but you can control what you do. The saying assumes a lack of autonomy over our emotions in contrast to our actions. But perhaps the order of operations runs the other way: you can control what you do, and in doing so come to control, at least in part, how you feel. 

Through an exploration of Aristotle's account of the relation between habituation and the affections in the Nicomachean Ethics, I argue that what one does bears on what one feels, and I take forgiveness as my case.