The key statement made at the outset of Schneewind’s comprehensive investigation of early modern moral philosophy is that “Kant invented the conception of morality as autonomy”. Schneewind supports this strong historical claim by distinguishing sharply between the concept of autonomy and the various notions of moral self-governance found in seventeenth and eighteenth century ethics. Generally speaking, we are morally self-governing when we are equipped, cognitively and emotionally, so as to require neither external sanctioning authority nor external instruction for the regulation (...) of our actions. Yet to base one’s moral theory on this kind of account of selfgovernance does not necessarily make one an advocate of autonomous ethics. We are autonomous only when, in addition to satisfying the requirements of self-governance, we are self-lawgiving. For Kant, we are morally self-governing because we are autonomous. Schneewind argues persuasively that this conception of moral autonomy is simply not present in the history of ethics prior to Kant. The book examines the historical context out of which Kant’s account of morality as autonomy emerged. It thereby brings to light the novelty of the Kantian approach to the question of moral self-governance. Yet it also makes plain the essential continuity of Kant’s theory of virtue and doctrine of right with traditional ethico-theological concerns underlying the systems of seventeenth and eighteenth century moral philosophy. A crucial key to understanding early modern moral philosophy in view of the theory of autonomy is to know exactly Kant’s place in a theoretical terrain determined largely by debates about how God can be kept essential to morality. Thus, Schneewind makes the question of voluntarism versus intellectualism the central guiding theme of his highly detailed analyses of individual ethical theories. In particular, Schneewind’s treatment of the relation between voluntarism and intellectualism allows him to show how late seventeenth century and eighteenth century moralities of self-governance emerged from criticism of the motivational assumptions behind modern natural law theories, the common distinguishing characteristic of which is the endorsement of a morality of obedience requiring external sanctions for the establishment of obligation. (shrink)

This is the first book to trace the doctrine of the guise of the good throughout the history of Western philosophy. It offers a chronological narrative exploring how the doctrine was formulated, the arguments for and against it, and the broader role it played in the thought of different philosophers. -/- In recent years there has been a rich debate about whether value judgment or value perception must form an essential part of mental states such as emotions and (...) desires, and whether intentional actions must always be done for reasons that seem good to the agent. This has sparked new theoretical interest in the classical doctrine of the guise of the good: whenever we desire (to do) something, we see it under the guise of the good; that is, we conceive of what we desire as good, desirable, or justified by reasons, in some way or another. This book offers a systematic historical treatment of the guise of the good. The chapters span from Ancient and Medieval philosophy (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas), through the early modern period (Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Kant) and up to Elizabeth Anscombe's rediscovery in the 20th century after a period of relative neglect. Together they demonstrate how history can offer potential new models of the guise of the good—or new arguments against it—as well as to give a sense of how the guise of the good can bear on other philosophical issues. -/- The Guise of the Good: A Philosophical History is an excellent resource for scholars and students working on the history of ethics, philosophy of action, and practical reason. -/- 1. Introduction 2. Socrates and Plato 3. Aristotle and the Stoics 4. The Canon in Christian Philosophy 5. The Canon Doubted and Reaffirmed (1300-1600) 6. Descartes and Spinoza: Revision and Rejection 7. Empiricism: The Guise of the Good between Desire and Pleasure 8. The Guise of the Good in Hume and Kant 9. After Kant, Before Anscombe 10. Epilogue. A Fresh Start. (shrink)

The history of emotions is one of the fastest growing fields in current historical debate, and this is the first book-length introduction to the field, synthesizing the current research, and offering direction for future study. This book is organized around the debate between social constructivist and universalist theories of emotion that has shaped most emotions research in a variety of disciplines for more than a hundred years: social constructivists believe that emotions are largely learned and subject (...) to historical change, while universalists insist on the timelessness and pan-culturalism of emotions. In historicizing and problematizing this binary, Jan Plamper opens emotions research beyond constructivism and universalism; he also maps a vast terrain of thought about feelings in anthropology, philosophy, sociology, linguistics, art history, political science, the life sciences - from nineteenth-century experimental psychology to the latest affective neuroscience - and history, from ancient times to the present day. (shrink)

Looking back to the crisis of the Reformation and beyond, Unbelievers shows how, long before philosophers started to make the case for atheism, powerful cultural currents were challenging traditional faith. These tugged in different ways not only on celebrated thinkers such as Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, and Pascal, but on men and women at every level of society whose voices we hear through their diaries, letters, and court records. Ryrie traces the roots of atheism born of anger, a sentiment familiar to (...) anyone who has ever cursed a corrupt priest, and of doubt born of anxiety, as Christians discovered their faith was flimsier than they had believed. As the Reformation eroded time-honored certainties, Protestant radicals defended their faith by redefining it in terms of ethics. In the process they set in motion secularizing forces that soon became transformational. Unbelievers tells a powerful emotional history of doubt with potent lessons for our own angry and anxious age. (shrink)

This book describes Descartes's The Passions of the Soul as a foundational work of the Enlightenment, a precursor of later notions of the historicity of the human, and the first psychology of modern type: to understand and heal ourselves, we look not outward at the world in immediate relation to it, but inward, at the self, its brain, and its past history. Special attention is given to Descartes’s account of imagination and its problematic impact on passion and volition.

The achievement of unity and perfection in human action begins with a struggle for these ideals in human thought. Dr. Klaus Vondung in his collection of essays that span four decades explores examples of this in different fields of human inquiry: striving for harmonious existential unity of talents and morals, intellect and emotion; seeking to make natural sciences consonant with the humanities and thereby moving toward a more universal, "perfect" science; and establishing unity in political structures and cultivating in this (...) unity a homogenous society. Vondung has given special devotion to National Socialism as a context wherein he revisits its perverted motivation and the consequences of this despite noble ideals. Particular focus in following the thread of unity and perfection in human intellectual and practical ambitions ultimately hones in on the combination of religion and politics. Vondung in these essays unpacks the ways in which this continues to fascinate and disturb us, and in his expertise he uses National Socialism to connect this pursuit of unity and perfection to what he calls one of the signature marks of modernity--namely, secular apocalypticism. This claim stands in opposition to Eric Voegelin's remark that Gnosticism, rather, is "the nature of modernity." Vondung, who studied and wrote his dissertation under Voegelin, grapples with the contrast of these positions. Vondung is willing to challenge Voegelin, but ultimately his treatment of the latter bears the quality of tribute to this great scholar. Vondung also explores the points of contact between apocalypticism and Hermetic speculation. Despite the independence of the religious and philosophical doctrines of Hermeticism, there are parallels to be found. Apocalypticism and Hermeticism originated in antiquity and yet each represents a tradition that still holds footing today. Vondung furthermore leads the reader to see the project of salvation found in both even as each operates with a different scope. This collection of essays centers itself on a perspective of the human pursuit of unity and perfection, directly or indirectly, as objectives of intellectual endeavors, existential ideals, as social or political outcomes, and in the case of National Socialism even as perverse aberrations. Vondung's particular treatment of Voegelin's work likewise establishes what the former identifies as a stand-out question of this study: Does the search of order in history show us the unity of the history of humankind? (shrink)

The history of emotions is a burgeoning field—so much so, that some are invoking an “emotional turn.” As a way of charting this development, I have interviewed three of the leading practitioners of the history of emotions: William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns. The interviews retrace each historian’s intellectual-biographical path to the history of emotions, recapitulate key concepts, and critically discuss the limitations of the available analytical tools. In doing so, they touch on (...) Reddy’s concepts of “emotive,” “emotional regime,” and “emotional navigation,” as well as on Rosenwein’s “emotional community” and on Stearns’s “emotionology” and offer glimpses of each historian’s ongoing research. The interviews address the challenges presented to historians by research in the neurosciences and the like, highlighting the distinctive contributions offered by a historical approach. In closing, the interviewees appear to reach a consensus, envisioning the history of emotions not as a specialized field but as a means of integrating the category of emotion into social, cultural, and political history, emulating the rise of gender as an analytical category since its early beginnings as “women’s history” in the 1970s. (shrink)

Over the course of the past several decades, Kant scholars have made significant headway in showing that emotions play a more significant role in Kant's ethics than has traditionally been assumed. Closer attention has been paid to the Metaphysics of Morals (MS) where Kant provides important insights about the value of moral sentiments and the role they should play in our lives. One particularly important discussion occurs in sections 34 and 35 of the Doctrine of Virtue where Kant claims (...) we have a duty to use sympathetic feelings "as a means of promoting active and rational benevolence" (MS 6:457). Kant labels this the "duty of humanity," and he suggests that nature has implanted sympathetic feelings in us "to do what the representation of duty alone might not accomplish" (ibid.). Commentators have rightly highlighted these remarks as prime evidence that feelings do play a positive role in Kant's ethics after all. (shrink)

This short work is concerned primarily to identify and elaborate Aristotle’s contribution to the understanding of emotional response and to trace the consequences of these doctrines for other departments of Aristotle’s thought. Incident to these purposes is an attempt to show the superiority of Aristotle’s views on these subjects over that of his predecessors, principally Plato. The book is considerably broader in scope than its title indicates, being virtually a concise history of the development of philosophical psychology in (...) ancient Greece. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn common usage, historical distance refers to a position of detached observation made possible by the passage of time. Understood in these terms, distance has long been regarded as essential to modern historical practice, but this conception narrows the idea of distance and burdens it with a regulatory purpose. I argue that distance needs to be re‐conceived in terms of the wider set of engagements that mediate our relations to the past, as well as the full spectrum of distance‐positions from (...) near to far. Re‐imagined in these terms, distance sheds its prescriptiveness and becomes a valuable heuristic for examining the history of historical representation. When distance is studied in relation to the range of mediations entailed in historical representation, it becomes evident that the plasticities of distance/proximity are by no means limited to gradients of time; rather, temporality is bound up with other distances that come from our need to engage with the historical past as a realm of making, of feeling, of doing, and of understanding. Thus for every historical work, we need to consider at least four basic dimensions of representation as they relate to the problem of mediating distance: 1. the genres, media, and vocabularies that shape the history's formal structures of representation; 2. the affective claims made by the historical account, including the emotional experiences it promises or withholds; 3. the work's implications for action, whether of a political or moral nature; and 4. the modes of understanding on which the history's intelligibility depends. These overlapping, but distinctive, distances—formal, affective, ideological, and conceptual—provide an analytic framework for examining changing modes of historical representation. (shrink)

In the fight against racism, philosophy has to interrogate caste in its own histories and current decolonial consensus. Caste has been evading its interrogation as the oldest race theory and racist practice, which continue to oppress the lower-caste peoples who constitute the majority population of the Indian subcontinent. Caste and race are species of the hypophysics of man, which consecrates scaled intrinsic value in human nature through the notion of “being born as” by “being born to.” They are analogues in (...) having the same denigrate-dominate function of exploiting by including as born inferior. However, caste and race are also homologues since the hypophysics of caste has been at the origins of the hypophysics of race from at least the eighteenth century, culminating in the “Aryan doctrine” of the Nazis, now being revived. Caste was the empirical, conceptual, and textual resource for Europeans as it showed that large groups could be dominated as well as excluded through the self-designated superiority, supplied by the Brahminical texts, of the oppressing group. Rather than a colonial construct, caste is the oldest racism, which in colonial times devised new calypsologies—ways to mask itself against rising anticaste thought and politics. Postcolonial and subaltern theories disguise caste’s racism as “religion,” “culture,” and subaltern subjectivity, while some sociologists have denigrated Dalit scholarship as unacademic and emotional. The homologies of caste are still dangerously regnant today. (shrink)

Yi Hwang (1501–1570)—best known by his literary name, T’oegye—is one of the most eminent thinkers in the history of East Asian philosophy and religion. His Chasŏngnok (Record of self-reflection) is a superb Korean Neo-Confucian text: an eloquent collection of twenty-two scholarly letters and four essays written to his close disciples and junior colleagues. These were carefully selected by T’oegye himself after self-reflecting (chasŏng) on his practice of personal cultivation. The Chasŏngnok continuously guided T’oegye and inspired others on the true (...) Confucian way (including leading Neo-Confucians in Tokugawa Japan) while it criticized Buddhism and Daoism. Its philosophical merit rivals T’oegye’s monumental Sŏnghak sipto (Ten diagrams on sage learning) and “Four-Seven Debate Letters”; however, as a testament of T’oegye’s character, scholarship, and teaching, the Chasŏngnok is of greater interest. The work engages with his holistic knowledge and experience of self-cultivation by articulating textual and historical material on various key doctrines and ideas. It is an inspiring practical guide that reveals the depth of T’oegye’s learning and spirituality. The present volume offers a fully annotated translation of the Chasŏngnok. Following a groundbreaking discussion of T’oegye’s life and ideas according to the Chasŏngnok and his other major writings, it presents the core of his thought in six interrelated sections: “Philosophy of Principle,” “Human Nature and Emotions,” “Against Buddhism and Daoism,” “True Learning,” “Self-Cultivation,” and “Reverence and Spiritual Cultivation.” The bibliography offers a current catalogue of primary sources and modern works in Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and English. As the first comprehensive study of the Chasŏngnok, this book is a welcome addition to current literature on Korean classics and East Asian philosophy and religion. By presenting T’oegye’s thought-provoking contributions, it sheds new light on the vitality of Confucian wisdom, thereby affording scholars and students with an excellent primary source for East Asian studies in general and Confucian studies in particular. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 411-412 [Access article in PDF] Deborah Achtenberg. Cognition of Value in Aristotle's Ethics: Promise of Enrichment, Threat of Destruction. Albany: The State University of New York Press, 2002. Pp. xiii + 218. Paper, $20.95.Deborah Achtenberg argues that, for Aristotle, virtue is a disposition to respond to situations with the appropriate emotions, where emotions are understood as perceptions of (...) the value of particulars. To perceive the value of a particular is to perceive that particular as a limit; some limits enable what they limit to be more fully what it is, while other limits do the opposite. My activity in writing this review, for example, is "limited" both by the rules of grammar and by my computer's tendency to crash frequently; one kind of limit enriches my activity, while the other hinders and threatens it (hence Achtenberg's subtitle). An enabling limit is a telos or end; something is a telos of yours if it connects you to a larger context that in some way fulfills or completes you.Achtenberg's interpretation enables her to steer Aristotle clear of a number of persistent false dichotomies. For example: is the doctrine of the mean an uninspiring counsel to do the middling thing, or a vacuous counsel to do whatever one ought to do? Neither, says Achtenberg; rather, it is Aristotle's way of insisting on the flexibility of the virtuous person's [End Page 411] responses. Is Aristotle siding, then, with Odysseus, who suppressed his emotions in order to suit his actions to the demands of the occasion, as against Achilles, who stubbornly followed his emotions regardless of circumstance? No, that dichotomy falls as well: the virtuous person has flexible emotional (not just behavioral) responses, and so can be as adaptable as Odysseus yet as sincere as Achilles.Does Aristotle's ethics have a metaphysical foundation, or is it autonomous? Achtenberg dissolves that dichotomy by distinguishing two different ways in which Aristotle takes ethics to be an "imprecise" science. First, ethics and metaphysics are both imprecise, because they share a common subject-matter (final causation) that is an analogical equivocal and so indefinable. Second, ethics is less precise than metaphysics because ethics can establish that, but not explain why, its claims are true. Metaphysics can explain the why of ethics, but for practical purposes the why is not necessary; so metaphysics is explanatorily but not epistemically prior to ethics.How can Aristotle's particularist-sounding denial that the virtuous person needs rules be reconciled with his insistence that the virtuous person follows a logos? Must we play down the logos passage, or instead conclude that Aristotle is a rule-theorist after all? Once again, neither: in this context, Achtenberg suggests, logos means "analogy," not "rule." Since goodness is an analogical equivocal, perceiving goodness means perceiving analogies. Being transcategorial, these analogies are not definable or codifiable, so the rule-theorists are wrong; but we are grasping something common to all good things, so the particularists are wrong too.Let me close with a couple of criticisms. Once the notion of an enabling limit has been established, Achtenberg seems to accept as unproblematic the inference to the legitimacy of paternalistic legislation: citizens are more free, not less, for being subjected to such coercion. Now on a view that regarded persons primarily as moral patients or recipients, it might be reasonable enough to elide in this way the difference between imposing limits on oneself and having them imposed by external compulsion; but it is harder to see how forcibly imposed limits could be constitutive of a life's being happier when happiness is defined, with Aristotle, as a self-generated activity.I think Achtenberg also fails to catch one false dichotomy. She contrasts Aristotle's theory, which seeks to increase and enhance emotional awareness, with the Stoic theory (as represented by Marcus Aurelius), which seeks to decrease or suppress such awareness. The contrast seems to me misleading. Both Aristotle and the Stoics agree that moral maturation involves... (shrink)

This article focuses on the emergence of a new subfield of emotion research known as “history of emotions.” People’s emotional lives depend on the construals which they impose on events, situations, and human actions. Different cultures and different languages suggest different habitual construals, and since habitual construals change over time, as a result, habitual feelings change, too. But to study construals we need a suitable methodology. The article assumes that such a methodology is provided by the Natural Semantic (...) Metalanguage (NSM) and it applies the NSM approach to the history of “happiness,” an emotion which is very much at the forefront of current debates across a range of disciplines. The article shows how the “history of emotions” can be combined with cultural semantics and why this combination opens new perspectives before the whole interdisciplinary field of emotion research. (shrink)

This study addresses two desiderata of historical emotion research: reflecting on the interdependence of textual functions and the representation of emotions, and acknowledging the interdependence of studies on the premodern and modern periods in the history of emotion. Contemporary research on the history of emotion is characterised by a proliferation of studies on very different eras, authors, themes, texts, and aspects. The enthusiasm and confidence with which situations, actions, and interactions involving emotions in history are (...) discovered, however, has led to overly direct attempts to access the represented objects (emotions/feelings/affects); as a result, too little attention has been paid to the conditions and functions of their representations. That is why this study engages with the emotion research of historians from an unashamedly philological perspective. Such an approach provides, among other things, insights into the varied, often contradictory, observations that can be made about the history of emotion in modernity and premodernity. (shrink)

This is a fascinating book. When the author admits in his introduction that he is not only a believer (albeit one who flirted with atheism in his youth) but also a licensed lay minister in the Chur...

Princess Diana’s death was a tragedy that provoked mourning across the globe; the death of a homeless person, more often than not, is met with apathy. How can we account for this uneven distribution of emotion? Can it simply be explained by the prevailing scientific understanding? Uncovering a rich tradition beginning with Aristotle, _The Secret History of Emotion_ offers a counterpoint to the way we generally understand emotions today. Through a radical rereading of Aristotle, Seneca, Thomas Hobbes, Sarah (...) Fielding, and Judith Butler, among others, Daniel M. Gross reveals a persistent intellectual current that considers emotions as psychosocial phenomena. In Gross’s historical analysis of emotion, Aristotle and Hobbes’s rhetoric show that our passions do not stem from some inherent, universal nature of men and women, but rather are conditioned by power relations and social hierarchies. He follows up with consideration of how political passions are distributed to some people but not to others using the Roman Stoics as a guide. Hume and contemporary theorists like Judith Butler, meanwhile, explain to us how psyches are shaped by power. To supplement his argument, Gross also provides a history and critique of the dominant modern view of emotions, expressed in Darwinism and neurobiology, in which they are considered organic, personal feelings independent of social circumstances. The result is a convincing work that rescues the study of the passions from science and returns it to the humanities and the art of rhetoric. (shrink)

An exploration of emotional life in the West, considering the varieties, transformations and constants of human emotions over eleven centuries.

_Tracing the story of anger from the Buddha to Twitter, Rosenwein provides a much-needed account of our changing and contradictory understandings of this emotion_ All of us think we know when we are angry, and we are sure we can recognize anger in others as well. But this is only superficially true. We see anger through lenses colored by what we know, experience, and learn. Barbara H. Rosenwein traces our many conflicting ideas about and expressions of anger, taking the story (...) from the Buddha to our own time, from anger’s complete rejection to its warm reception. Rosenwein explores how anger has been characterized by gender and race, why it has been tied to violence and how that is often a false connection, how it has figured among the seven deadly sins and yet is considered a virtue, and how its interpretation, once largely the preserve of philosophers and theologians, has been gradually handed over to scientists—with very mixed results. Rosenwein shows that the _history _of anger can help us grapple with it today. (shrink)

A history of the concept of God through the lens of process thought.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:194 BOOK REVIEWS detailed discussion. Successive chapters examine Schleiermacher's theory of religious experience, two conceptions of interpretation, the ascription of emotion to oneself and others, mysticism, religious experience as such, and different kinds of explanation of religious experience and the issue of reductionism. The book as a whole seems to me rather an impressive treatment of a very important subject. University of Calgary Calgary, Alberta HUGO A. MAYNELL Intimations (...) of Reality: Critical Realism in Science and Religion. By ARTHUR PEACOCKE. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984. Pp. 94. $10.95(cl.), $4.95(pa.). In the first of the two lectures printed in this small volume, Peacocke argues for a " critical realist " interpretation of both scientific theories and religious doctrines. Both aim (fallibly but genuinely) to speak of reality, and their methods and tools are similar enough so that if the claims of one deserve to be taken seriously, so do those of the other. Addressing one reality as they do, science and theology cannot proceed in isolation, but must he regarded as "interacting and mutually illumiminating " (51). In the second lecture Peacocke offers suggestions as to how theologians should construe the relation between God and the created world, in view of what scientists are now telling us about the latter. Many of the ideas presented here are familiar from Peacocke's earlier Creation and the World of Science and from writings of Ian Barbour and others. The main novelty lies in his buttressing the case for (and refining the interpretation of) critical realism with arguments drawn from recent work in the philosophy of science. I will start with his discussion of critical realism with respect to science, and then consider his claims for theology, his argument for the mutual relevance of the two, and (briefly) his theological suggestions. · As Peacocke sees the history of the subject, an earller-prevalent "naive realism " about scientific theories and the entities mentioned in them has been undermined chiefly by the work of T. S. Kuhn et al., especially as extended and radicalized by sociologists of science-most pointedly by those pursuing the " strong programme " of explaining scientific theories past and present as social products, without regard to any assessment of their truth value and thus without invoking conformity to reality in explaining a theory's acceptance or success. The recent revival BOOK REVIEWS 195 of realism among philosophers of science he views largely in the aspect of a rebuttal of the sociologists' anti-realist claims. He notes, but sets aside as ancillary to his project, the question what we might learn from the strong-programmers even if we deny their more radical claims. Fair enough. What is more regrettable is that the unwary reader could easily come away with the impression that contemporary philosophers of science are to be found in just two camps on these matters: realists and sociologically-minded anti-realists. In fa.ct, there have been and are quite a few--e.g. Bas van Fraasen and Larry Laudan-who argue against realism on grounds quite independent of sociology : Duhemian grounds, for instance, and considerations drawn from quantum theory. (See van Frassen's The Scientific Image, Laudan's Science and Values, and their respective essay:;; in Scientific Realism, edited by Jarrett Leplin.) So, while there is a revival of realism in philosophy of science, there is hardly a consensus, though it is no doubt also true that most working scientists, unaffected by the philosophers' debate, would adopt some form of critical realism. But how, specifically, does critical realism differ from the naive kind' The difficulty of answering this question is compounded by the great variety of theses held by various authors to be central claims of realism (or anti-realism) simpliciter. This variety is well illustrated in Leplin's collection, and anatomized in his introduction to it. One of the authors on whom Peacocke draws, Ian Ha.eking, distinguishes, in his contribution to the Leplin volume and at greater length in his Representing and Intervening, between realism about entities (theoretical terms, or many of them, do refer; there are such things as electrons) and realism about theories (scientific theories, even large-scale ones like the fundamental... (shrink)

The dominant consequentialist, Kantian, and contractualist theories by virtue ethicists such as G.E.M. Anscombe, Alisdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, and Michael Stocker have been criticized for their neglect of the emotions. There are three reasons why it might be a mistake for moral philosophy to neglect the emotions. Emotions have an important influence on motivation, and proper cultivation of the emotions is helpful, perhaps essential, to our ability to lead ethical lives. It is a plausible thesis that (...) an ethical life involves feeling certain ways in certain circumstances and acting from certain feelings in certain circumstances. Some emotions are forms of ethical perception, judgment, or even knowledge. This chapter examines the Ancient ethical tradition that inspires the virtue ethicists' critique, revealing versions of each of these three theses in one guise or another. It first considers the medieval transformations of the ancient doctrines, and then focuses on the third, more contentious thesis, distinguishing several versions of it in the moral philosophies of the seventeenth and eighteenth century and indicating some contemporary exemplars as well. (shrink)

Self-righteousness and censoriousness are strong emotions. They exist in the claims of ‘orthodoxy’ as much as in the protests of ‘heterodoxy’. They lie behind claims of tolerance as often as behind displays of intolerance. These emotions should be disentangled in the motives of the men who make history, of those who write history, and of those who read history. The very designation ‘heterodox’ is both etymologically and conceptually structured in antithesis to ‘orthodox’. It is a (...) word not only of doctrinal description, but also of inherent condemnation. The structure and the intention of words such as Shī‘a , comprising the whole sweep from bid‘a to ghulūww , direct the attention back to an opposite concept which originates, defines and prejudges these words. One corollary of this is that the movements and doctrines defined as ‘heterodox’ are fundamentally related to the ‘orthodox’ and cannot be understood in isolation. Another is that this relationship, by its very definition in terms of vindication and repudiation, is one of tension. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's ‘Rhetoric’ to Modern Brain ScienceMichael J. HydeThe Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's ‘Rhetoric’ to Modern Brain Science. Daniel M. Gross. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. x + 194. $35.00, Hardcover.The twofold goal of this book is clearly stated by its author: "to reconstitute by way of critical intellectual history a deeply nuanced, rhetorical understanding of (...) emotion that prevailed until the triumph of psychophysiology; second, to show by way of literary and philosophical example how this rhetorical perspective helps us read anew the emotional complex of modernity, whether early or late" (8). Gross' appreciation of the function of emotion emphasizes a phenomenological orientation that is inspired by Martin Heidegger's unpublished 1924 lecture course on Aristotle's Rhetoric. Gross recently co-edited with Ansgar Kemmann a book of original essays dedicated to a critical assessment of this lecture course (Gross and Kemmann 2006). In concluding her contribution to the book, the well-known Renaissance scholar Nancy S. Struever maintains that the course "remains, arguably, the best twentieth-century reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric" (Struever 2006: 127). Gross advances this reading with his creative and insightful assessment of his topic.This advance unfolds as Gross, abiding by phenomenology's well-known critique of the matter, takes issue with the reductive psychophysiology of emotion that Descartes first proposed and that informs latter-day sciences of the mind and the brain. Gross turns to the research program of the distinguished cognitive scientist Antonio Damasio as a way of arguing "how brain science of emotion goes awry when it blunders into social fact" (29). The reductionism of science, in other words, misses the forest for the trees. Admitting that Damasio is open to inquiries outside the boundaries of neurobiology, Gross nevertheless takes particular issue with Damasio's model for such a project: Edward O. Wilson's, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Indeed, Wilson never gives rhetoric a nod when he acknowledges the worth of the humanities in his book.This slight, coming from Wilson, Damasio, and other scientists, fuels Gross's enthusiasm for turning to Aristotle's analysis of the pathe in book two of the Rhetoric. With Aristotle's discussion of "anger" in mind, for example, Gross emphasizes how we live in "a contoured world of emotional investments, where some people have significantly more liabilities than others" (3). [End Page 326]The point warrants elaboration: "The contours of our emotional world have been shaped by institutions such as slavery and poverty that simply afford some people greater emotional range than others, as they are shaped by publicity that has nothing to do with the inherent values of each human life and everything to do with technologies of social recognition and blindness" (4). Gross links this Aristotelian based social-psychological insight with such early modern philosophers, psychologists, and cultural critics as Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, William Perfect, and then with such contemporary intellectuals as Judith Butler. Gross' discussion of this linkage enables him to argue a key point in his overall project: the constitutive power of emotions depends not on how the social passions originate in a moral sense equally shared by all, but rather on the "uneven distribution" of these passions in our social and political lives.Gross makes much of how the rhetoric of this uneven distribution is at work in such particular cases as Aristotle's apathetic slave, Seneca's angry tyrant, Hobbes's resentful preacher, Sarah Fielding's humble hero, and Adam Smith's compassionate spectator. Gross's intellectual acumen shines as he weaves together these cases and expands on their implications for developing a rhetorical understanding of emotion. For example, in chapter three ("Virtues of Passivity in the English Civil War"), Gross offers a critical assessment of Michael Walzer's classic The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics in order to show how the emotional makeup of passivity, too often "relegated to a diminished femininity" (87), not only informs the virtue of humility, but also helps it serve rhetorically "the most dramatic revolutionary ends" (110). Additional extended case studies emphasize the specific emotions of apathy, pride, pity... (shrink)

Loneliness is one of the most neglected aspects of emotion history, despite claims that the 21st century is the loneliest ever. This article argues against the widespread belief that modern-day loneliness is inevitable, negative, and universal. Looking at its language and etymology, it suggests that loneliness needs to be understood firstly as an “emotion cluster” composed of a variety of affective states, and secondly as a relatively recent invention, dating from around 1800. Loneliness can be positive, and as much (...) a part of the body as the mind. Using a longue durée approach, I argue that we cannot understand loneliness as a “modern epidemic” without considering its history, its meanings, its practice, and its links with the body. (shrink)

This chapter looks at the history of romantic love in Sub-Saharan Africa. This text comes from a lecture given at the British Academy's 2009 Raleigh Lecture on History. This text attempts to explore some of the methodological and theoretical issues involved in an historical study of love in Africa. It argues that romantic love in Africa is not simply an extension of an imperialist cultural and political project and that emotional regimes cannot be divorced from economic circumstances. It (...) explains that though the configurations of interest and emotion take specific forms in African societies, there is nothing peculiarly African about the evident need of individuals to balance realism and idealism in their emotional lives. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.1 (2003) 143-146 [Access article in PDF] William V. Harris. Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. xii + 468 pp. Cloth, $49.95. It is a mark of evolving interests in the discipline that a well-known ancient historian should choose to write a major book on the ancient understanding of a single emotion. This reflects both (...) an ever-widening conception of what social history can include (and of how social and political history are interconnected) and the intense study in recent years of ancient ideas about the nature and therapy of the emotions, especially in Hellenistic and Roman philosophy. This book combines specificity of focus with breadth of evidence examined. The topic is not just anger but, more precisely, the ideology, broadly understood, of anger control. The evidence discussed ranges from Homer to early Christian ideas in late antiquity; it embraces literature, historiography, and philosophy, among much else. The combination of a single line of enquiry and comprehensiveness of material is crucial to the character and value of this study.The project of the book can be defined more exactly. Harris sets out to examine the evidence for ancient thought about anger and to contextualize it, placing it in a socially oriented history of ideas. This project explains the structure of the book. Part 1 considers the relevant material, above all the Hellenistic-Roman philosophical treatises on control of anger, and explores questions of method and approach. Key points include the difference between Greek or Roman and modern English vocabulary, such as the Greek distinction between violent temper ( orge \) and "spirit" or impulse ( thumos), and the importance of placing the Hellenistic treatises in a developing tradition of emotional self-control from the fifth century B.C. onwards. Part 2, the largest, connects Greco-Roman thought about the restraint of anger with salient features of political and social structure; this is extended, in part 3, to family life and the treatment of slaves. Part 4 returns to ancient ideas, especially in philosophy, about anger as a "sickness of soul" to be treated by "therapy"; these ideas are now placed within a larger history of anger control from archaic Greece to late antiquity.Inevitably, with a topic of such breadth, some of the discussion surveys material examined more fully by scholars writing from more specialist standpoints. This is so, for instance, in the review of philosophical ideas on control of anger in chapters 6 and 14-15 (though these ideas have not, I think, been assembled before in a single study). The main originality of the book lies in the social contextualization of ideas, particularly in parts 2 and 3. Here, a set of substantively new claims are offered, bearing especially on the explanation of the [End Page 143] prominence of the theme of anger control in Greek and Roman culture. For instance, the presentation of Achilles' rage in the Iliad as intensely problematic, taken with the more positive characterization of Odysseus' revenge (which depends on restraint of anger) in the Odyssey, is seen as expressing a growing awareness of the dangers of heroic or kingly rage in a period (ca. 700 B.C.) when the Greek archaic city-states were emerging from their pre-polis form (chapter 7, especially 145-46). Analogously, the preoccupation with the destructive impact of violent anger ( orge \) and the reiterated stress on emotional control ( so \ phrosune \) in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., in contexts such as drama, historiography, and oratory, are taken as integral elements of the growth of cooperative life in the polis. Harris draws on Norbert Elias's thesis that the internalisation of doctrines restraining the motives (including anger) that generate violent aggression constitutes a key part of the development of civilized society (150).A comparably wide range of sources is reviewed for Roman attitudes; much of the evidence is drawn from the late Republic, a period when violent anger played a major role in the disruption of social and political order—although this connection is not... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 43-50 [Access article in PDF] On the Practice of Faith: A Lutheran's Interior Dialogue with Buddhism Paul O. Ingram Pacific Lutheran University I earn my living practicing the craft of history of religions. In Lutheran theological language, this is my "calling" and "vocation." I know this to be true because of how I was first opened to an amazing world of religious pluralism nearly (...) forty years ago during my first undergraduate history of religions course. I am still amazed by this world and at times stunned to silence. The history of religions continues to inform my self-understanding and has recently become for me a primary mode of theological reflection and practice that intensely energizes both my exterior conceptual dialogue with Buddhist doctrine and teaching and my interior dialogue with Buddhist meditative practice. 1So my vocation is teaching an academic field of inquiry I love to young people as I engage in research and writing. I am paid for doing this by a university related to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America that bills itself as a "new American university" located in one of the most culturally pluralistic and beautiful regions in the United States.While I'm not sure what a "new American university" is, I am certain I have a great gig. I am equally convinced that my professional life constitutes for me some of the evidence of the grace that Christian tradition in general--and Luther's theology in particular--describe as flowing "in, with, and under" this universe like a waterfall, like a tidal wave.Admittedly, all this is highly confessional, perhaps too confessional, for a scholar's essay on how reflection on Buddhist traditions of practice has informed his practice. Yet when it comes down to it, all theological reflection--as well as the discipline of practice itself--is confessional. We can only write about our particular interior journey as it is informed by the particular community of faith that gives context to our practice, for it is not probable that most persons can be religious in general, but only in particular. 2 After all, Carmelite nuns do not ordinarily seek or experience nonduality with the Buddha Nature, nor do Buddhist nuns ordinarily seek or experience interior union with Christ the Bridegroom.Yet sometimes a few historians of religions and a few Christian theologians and Buddhist philosophers are able to participate in communities of faith and practice other than their own. This too seems to me a sign of grace. [End Page 43]I have learned two lessons from interior dialogue with Buddhists as this shakes out in my particular practice. First, our interior journeys lead us through time--forward and back, seldom in a straight line, most often in spirals. Each of us is moving and changing in relationship to others and to the world, and, if one is grasped by Christian faith, to God, or if grasped by Buddhist faith (srada), the Dharma. 3 As we discover what our interior journeys teach us, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we discover when our separate journeys converge. It is at spots of Christian and Buddhist convergence that I have experienced the most dramatic and creatively transformative processes of interreligious dialogue.Second, as a Lutheran it strikes me as a bit glib to suggest that the focus of practice is "God" or, if Buddhist, "Emptiness," because I often feel intellectually and emotionally blindsided by what people who practice mean by these words. The question, always an epistemological one, is what do these terms mean as we practice whatever we practice. Plenty of theological-philosophical propositions can be strung together to answer this question, and, I think, it is important to guide practice by theological-philosophical reflection. But we must never cling to belief in propositions, because the moment we do, they will hide the reality to which they point. Conceptualizing and believing in rational propositions is a necessary beginning because it is a form of"faith seeking understanding." But faith is never, in... (shrink)

Akhbārī Shi'ism was "scripturalist" in that Akhbārīs believed that all questions of theology and law could be found in the texts of revelation. There was no need, they believed, to turn to alternative sources . This book offers the first detailed study of the School's doctrines and history.

In this book, Françoise Mirguet traces the appropriation and reinterpretation of pity by Greek-speaking Jewish communities of Late Antiquity. Pity and compassion, in this corpus, comprised a hybrid of Hebrew, Greek, and Roman constructions; depending on the texts, they were a spontaneous feeling, a practice, a virtue, or a precept of the Mosaic law. The requirement to feel for those who suffer sustained the identity of the Jewish minority, both creating continuity with its traditions and emulating dominant discourses. Mirguet's book (...) will be of interest to scholars of early Judaism and Christianity for its sensitivity to the role of feelings and imagination in the shaping of identity. An important contribution to the history of emotions, it explores the role of the emotional imagination within the context of Roman imperialism. It also contributes to understanding how compassion has come to be so highly valued in Western cultures. (shrink)

The word “emotion” has named a psychological category and a subject for systematic enquiry only since the 19th century. Before then, relevant mental states were categorised variously as “appetites,” “passions,” “affections,” or “sentiments.” The word “emotion” has existed in English since the 17th century, originating as a translation of the French émotion, meaning a physical disturbance. It came into much wider use in 18th-century English, often to refer to mental experiences, becoming a fully fledged theoretical term in the following century, (...) especially through the influence of two Scottish philosopher-physicians, Thomas Brown and Charles Bell. This article relates this intellectual and semantic history to contemporary debates about the usefulness and meaning of “emotion” as a scientific term. (shrink)

In Western religious traditions, God is conventionally conceived as a humanlike creator, lawgiver, and king, a being both accessible and actively present in history. Yet there is a concurrent tradition of a God who actively hides, leading to a tension between a God who is simultaneously accessible and yet inaccessible, both immanent and transcendent, present and absent. Western Gnostic, esoteric, and mystical thinking capitalizes on the hidden and hiding God. Histories of the Hidden God explores this tradition from antiquity (...) to today. The essays focus on three essential themes: the concealment of the hidden God; the human quest for the hidden God, and revelations of the hidden God. (shrink)