The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science
University of Chicago Press (2006)
| Abstract | 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. | |||||||||
| Keywords | Emotions History Emotions (Philosophy History | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Buy the book | $23.41 direct from Amazon (7% off) Amazon page | |||||||||
| Call number | BF531.G76 2006 | |||||||||
| ISBN(s) | 9780226309798 0226309797 0226309800 9780226309804 | |||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,865 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesDemian Whiting (2011). The Feeling Theory of Emotion and the Object-Directed Emotions. European Journal of Philosophy 19 (2):281-303.
Ralph Adolphs (2000). Is Reward an Emotion? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (2):192-192.
Dennis E. Skocz (2007). Aristotle and Heidegger on the “Worldliness” of Emotion: A Hermeneutical Auseinandersetzung. Epoché 12 (1):157-168.
Robert C. Solomon (ed.) (2004). Thinking About Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions. Oxford University Press.
Edmund T. Rolls (2007). Emotion Explained. OUP Oxford.
Jamie Dow (2007). A Supposed Contradiction About Emotion-Arousal in Aristotle's Rhetoric. Phronesis 52 (4):382-402.
Kristján Kristjánsson (2008). Expendable Emotions. International Philosophical Quarterly 48 (1):5-22.
Michael J. Hyde (2007). The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's 'Rhetoric' to Modern Brain Science (Review). Philosophy and Rhetoric 40 (3):326-329.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads10 ( #107,683 of 556,803 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #64,847 of 556,803 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
