  Sentimentalism can be understood broadly, so as to include sensibility theory despite its no-priority claim, or more narrowly as the thesis that a given value “depends on some internal sense or feeling which nature has made universal in the species” (Hume 1740/1975: 172). Note that sentimentalism must claim, in either case, that those emotions on which it focuses are not merely epistemic routes to independently existing values. For instance, amusement cannot merely be a sensitivity to the funny, in order to be amenable to a sentimentalist theory of humor in terms of (fitting) amusement. I will here adopt the narrow usage, which makes sensibility theory not a form of sentimentalism but a close relation to it. The crucial difference is that a Humean sentimentalist view gives priority to those universal human feelings: certain basic or pan-cultural emotions I'm referring to as sentiments. These will not include all the various states commonly called emotions, and a sentimentalist might well accept a no-priority account of the relation between certain values and “cognitively sharpened” emotions such as resentment, as opposed to simple anger (D'Arms and Jacobson 2003). 