Nussbaum concludes her theory of the emotions by focusing on music in particular. She chose music since she believed that the topic is of great intrinsic interest and provided her with an opportunity to display the merit of the account of the emotions that she had developed. She further believed that by focusing on music, she was in a better position to solve some problems that other accounts of the emotions could not solve. The focus on music also enabled her to make additional refinements to her account. Finally, she explains that, although the topic of music and emotion is discussed more often nowadays than previously, it is still a relatively neglected topic in aesthetic theory. Since the topic of music is still marginalised in education today, and since the last part of this book examines education's potential role in fostering emotions, I decided to include Nussbaum’s convincing arguments here too.

Nussbaum contends that music has profound links with the emotional life. And yet, it seems difficult to describe the nature of these links. This might be attributed to deficiencies in previous theories of the emotions, and Nussbaum postulates that her theory may help to elucidate issues that have proved complicated in the past. When one thinks about the topic of ‘Music and Emotion’, two apparently diverse issues emerge, namely, the emotions of the listener, and the expressive qualities of the music per se. Although these two questions cannot be answered in isolation, they must first be discussed separately.

Regarding the emotions of the listener, several questions immediately emerge, for instance, are the emotions we have when we listen to music ‘real’ emotions? What emotions are these? Whose emotions are these? What is the intentional object of the emotion? What is the content of the emotion? With regard to people's ascription of emotions to the music itself, Nussbaum believes that people often make judgements about the expressive properties of the music by describing the music as joyful or peaceful. However, the real question to be asked is whether they are in fact saying something significant about the music itself when they make these judgements.