Krista K. Thomason

Book review! ''Dancing with the Devil: Why Bad Feelings Make Life Good" by Krista K. Thomason
I'll admit right from the start that general-public philosophy books are my jam and have been since I read Alain de Botton's ''The Consolations of Philosophy'' in highschool. I feel like if more people were aware of all of the different ways humans before us have approached questions of living good, fulfiling lives, we'd have a headstart in figuring out how we want to live our own. Professor Thomason's book is the Platonic ideal of the genre. Offering a wide array of well-cited examples that you can later dig into, the book is a guided tour through millenia-long debates about how to live with negative emotions. Where most people take for granted that we must do our utmost never to feel the ''ugliest'' of human emotions (think envy, schadenfreude, contempt), Thomason takes a step back, pulls apart the emotion from harmful actions taken in the name of the emotion, and asks what the emotion is telling us (often, that we care about something). You know a non-fiction book is good when you wish it were longer. Professor Thomason is also very funny. (Eugene and I laughed out loud together at multiple points.) Even the endnotes are worth reading carefully! I loved seeing for example, that she cites an older paper but no longer agrees with the position she argued in it. I went into the book having been strongly convinced I needed to exert a lot of control on my negative emotions and I come out with a new perspective on and appreciation for them.
Full disclosure: Professor Thomason was one of my absolute favorite professors in undergrad.… (plus d'informations)