But this doesn't quite get round the fact that theory without sentiment is what text books are for and that, as in so much of his work, the flashes of humour and pathos are never quite substantial enough to carry the intellectual weight dumped on top of them.
Hume's theory of sentiments requires that if we are going to have an aesthetic evaluation of a play's plotting and language, then we are also going to have a moral response to its display of virtue and vice.
Adam Smith developed a comprehensive and somewhat unusual version of moral sentimentalism in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759, TMS).
That, he thought, constitutes a form of generational theft.The first these, the temptation to meddle, touches on a core component of Smith's philosophy, most notably captured, Mr Otteson says, in the great economist's first book, "The Theory of Moral Sentiment" (1759).
Toward the poem's end, Bernstein says, "The question isn't is art up to this but what else is art for?" I can think of a lot of things art might be for, including — taking a cue from "All the Whiskey in Heaven" — documentation, commemoration, celebration, satire, theory mongering, genuine sentiment.
Drawing on resources ranging from Hume's theory of moral sentiment to recent findings in neuroscience, Civil Passions breaks new ground by providing a systematic account of how passions can generate an impartial standpoint that yields binding and compelling conclusions in politics.
As implied by sentiment theory (see Sect. 1), sentiment has a medium-term reversal effect on returns.
Hume's immediate successor in sentiment theory, Adam Smith, held a important view about the role and place of benevolence that has influenced a number of writers in business ethics.
Investor sentiment theory argues that overly optimistic investors over value IPO prices in the short-run, which erodes long-run performance (Aggarwal and Rivoli, 1990); Ritter (1991); Loughran and Ritter (1995).
Smith was critical of Mandeville and presented a more nuanced view of human nature in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), but modern economic and political discourse is not about nuance.
