Cultivating one’s emotions—that is, learning to feel anger or pride, say, at the right time and in the right way—is central to becoming a better, happier person. But while this much is agreed on, our current understanding of how to shape our emotions for the better, as well as what it is to be emotionally competent, is messy and unsettled. As it stands, we lack a well-theorized account of both the capacities that are central to emotional competence and the values that we’re seeking to promote with our emotion cultivation efforts. Against this backdrop, my talk has two aims. First, I introduce the notion of “emotional literacy” as a framework for understanding emotion cultivation, developing it by drawing on insights from how the concept of literacy has been understood in discussions of language and morality. Second, I present a set of case studies that illustrate how my account of emotional literacy offers something better than what we find in existing proposals from philosophers, psychologists, and education scholars.

Charlie Kurth grew up in Washington, DC and went to college at the University of Virginia. Before returning to school to get a Ph.D. in philosophy, he spent three years working in finance in New York City. Charlie’s research and teaching interests include: ethics (all flavors), moral psychology, emotion, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. Recent he has been interested in questions at the intersection of the philosophy of emotion and ethical theory. Charlie has received awards for both his research and teaching. Before coming to Clemson, Charlie was a Fellow at the Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. He has also held positions at Western Michigan University and Washington University in St. Louis. He received his Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego in 2011. In January 2027, he will be joining the faculty of the UGA Philosophy Department.