Author: Charlie Kurth An empirically informed, philosophical account of the nature of anxiety and its value for agency, virtue, and decision making.In The Anxious Mind, Charlie Kurth offers a philosophical account of anxiety in its various forms, investigating its nature and arguing for its value in agency, virtue, and decision making. Folk wisdom tells us that anxiety is unpleasant and painful, and scholarly research seems to provide empirical and philosophical confirmation of this. But Kurth points to anxiety's positive effects: enhancing performance, facilitating social interaction, and even contributing to moral thought and action.Kurth argues that an empirically informed philosophical account of anxiety can help us understand the nature and value of emotions, and he offers just such an account. He develops a model of anxiety as a bio-cognitive emotion -- anxiety is an aversive emotional response to uncertainty about threats or challenges -- and shows that this model captures the diversity in the types of anxiety we experience. Building on this, he considers a range of issues in moral psychology and ethical theory. He explores the ways in which anxiety can be valuable, arguing that anxiety can be a fitting response and that it undergirds an important form of moral concern. He considers anxiety's role in deliberation and decision making, using the examples of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the abolitionist John Woolmanto show that anxiety can be a mechanism of moral progress. Drawing on insights from psychiatry and clinical psychology, Kurth argues that we can cultivate anxiety so that we are better able to experience it at the right time and in the right way.

Author: Naomi Greene The major Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was also a poet, novelist, essayist, and iconoclastic political commentator. Naomi Greene reveals to English-speaking readers the diverse talents that made him one of the most controversial European intellectuals of the postwar era, at the center of political and cultural debates still vital to our time. Greene presents Pasolini's films to the English-speaking world in full detail and in a rich critical context, using them to trace the evolution of his ideas and the details of his troubled personal life from 1950, when he settled in Rome, to 1975, the year of his brutal murder, apparently at the hands of a young male prostitute. In her concise and sympathetic book, Greene intelligently explicates the political and social context within which Pasolini became both a leading figure and a significant heretic. He was an atheist who directed one of the few genuinely profound biblical films in the cinema, a communist who severely criticized many of the radical movements of modern Italy. Though he publicly acknowledged his homosexuality, he privately referred to it as his sickness. As the book well documents, Pasolini was not a rebel but rather an authentic heretic who worked in contradiction to both his medium and milieu.--ChoiceOriginally published in .The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.