_TABLE OF CONTENTS:_ Translator's Introduction Introduction by Genevieve Rodis-Lewis _The Passions of the Sou_l: Preface PART I: About the Passions in General, and Incidentally about the Entire Nature of Man PART II: About the Number and Order of the Passions, and the Explanation of the Six Primitives PART III: About the Particular Passions Lexicon: Index to Lexicon Bibliography Index Index Locorum.

'Those most capable of being moved by passion are those capable of tasting the most sweetness in this life.'Descartes is most often thought of as introducing a total separation of mind and body. But he also acknowledged the intimate union between them, and in his later writings he concentrated on understanding this aspect of human nature. The Passions of the Soul is his greatest contribution to this debate. It contains a profound discussion of the workings of the (...) emotions and of their place in human life - a subject that increasingly engages the interest of philosophers and intellectual and cultural historians. It also sets out a view of ethics that has been seen as a radical reorientation of moral philosophy.This volume also includes both sides of the correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, one of Descartes's keenest disciples and shrewdest critics, which played a crucial role in the genesis of The Passions, as well as the first part of The Principles of Philosophy, which sets out the key positions of Descartes's philosophical system.ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

I here address Descartes' account of human nature as a union of mind and body by appealing to The Passions of the Soul. I first show that Descartes takes us to be able to reform the naturally instituted associations between bodily and mental states. I go on to argue that Descartes offers a teleological explanation of body-mind associations (those instituted both by nature and by artifice). This explanation sheds light on the ontological status of the (...) union. I suggest that it affords a way of understanding how mind and body form a true unit without compromising Descartes' dualism. (shrink)

Descartes developed an elaborate theory of animal physiology that he used to explain functionally organized, situationally adapted behavior in both human and nonhuman animals. Although he restricted true mentality to the human soul, I argue that he developed a purely mechanistic (or material) ‘psychology’ of sensory, motor, and low-level cognitive functions. In effect, he sought to mechanize the offices of the Aristotelian sensitive soul. He described the basic mechanisms in the Treatise on man, which he summarized in (...) the Discourse. However, the Passions of the soul contains his most ambitious claims for purely material brain processes. These claims arise in abstract discussions of the functions of the passions and in illustrations of those functions. Accordingly, after providing an intellectual context for Descartes’s theory of the passions, especially by comparison with that of Tho- mas Aquinas, I examine its ‘machine psychology’, including the role of habituation and association. I contend that Descartes put forth what may reasonably be called a ‘psychology’ of the unensouled animal body and, correspondingly, of the human body when the soul does not intervene. He thus conceptually distinguished a mechanistically explicable sensory and motor psychology, common to nonhuman and human animals, from true mentality involving higher cognition and volition and requiring (in his view) an immaterial mind. (shrink)

On the basis of Descartes’s account of the passions of the soul, we argue that current interoception-based theories of emotions cannot account for the hallmark of a passion of the soul, i.e., that its effects are felt as being in the soul itself. We also pay attention to the epistemic functions of the passions and to Descartes’s category of emotions that are caused and occur in the soul alone. Certain passions of (...) the soul and certain internal emotions are similar to what are today called ‘epistemic feelings’ and ‘epistemic emotions.’ Descartes’s work reflects another challenge for contemporary embodied cognition: how might epistemic affect be embodied? Since the signature of embodiment is increasingly understood as interoceptive, the challenge to interoceptive research is demonstrating the degree to which affect results from interoception. This challenge also implies that the locus of emotional experience is taken into account. (shrink)

While Descartes’s Passions of the Soul has been taken to hold a place in the history to human physiology, until recently philosophers have neglected the work. In this research summary, I set Descartes’s last published work in context and then sketch out its philosophical significance. From it, we gain further insight into Descartes’s solution to the Mind--Body Problem -- that is, to the problem of the ontological status of the mind--body union in a human being, (...) to the nature of body--mind causation, and to the way body-caused thoughts represent the world. In addition, the work contains Descartes’s developed ethics, in his account of virtue and of the passion of générosité in particular. Through his taxonomy of the passions and the account of their regulation, we also learn more about his moral psychology. (shrink)

I begin this paper with a survey of the textual evidence for a new Cartesian subject, a post-Cartesian Cartesian individual, for whom the life of the body, its passions, and its relationships are central. In the second section, I consider his remarks on hatred, which complicate his view embodied life. Even if Descartes’s study of the passions in his treatise as well as his correspondence calls for a more nuanced understanding of the Cartesian person, we will find (...) in his attention to embodiment a conflicted and wary human being for whom relationships can be nourishing and sweet just as easily as they can be noxious and bitter. (shrink)

Descartes claims that the passions of the soul are “all in their nature good” even though they exaggerate the value of their objects, have the potential to deceive us, and often mislead us. What, then, can he mean by this? In this paper, I argue that these effects of the passions are only problematic when we incorrectly take their goodness to consist in their informing us of harms and benefits to the mind-body composite. Instead, the (...) class='Hi'>passions are good in their motivational function, which they carry out by representing objects and situations as having various properties and thereby appearing to be “reasons of goodness.” Further, I argue that the main way in which the passions are problematic is merely an occasional physiological byproduct of a well- functioning system. I show, therefore, that the passions’ motivational function, representationality, and accompanying physiology are all significant and interrelated aspects of their goodness. (shrink)

The definition of love given by Descartes in the Passions of the Soul has never stopped puzzling commentators. If the first Cartesian textbooks discreetly evoke or even fail to discuss Descartes’s account of love, Spinoza harshly criticizes it, pointing out that it is ‘on all hands admitted to be very obscure’. More recently several scholars have noticed the puzzling character of the articles of the Passions of the Soul on love and hate. In this (...) paper, I would like to propose a reassessment of the definition of love provided by the Passions of the Soul and the Letters to Elisabeth and Chanut. By tracing back Descartes’s scholastic sources, I will demonstrate how Descartes builds up his definition of love by displacing or subverting the meaning of several major elements of the thomistic vulgata on love. Hence, a significant part of the obscurity of the definition given by the Passions of the Soul possibly finds its ultimate rationale in this attempt to recover some traditional questions of the scholastic debate on love, while advancing new answers to them. (shrink)

Based on the new and much acclaimed two volume Cambridge edition of The Philosophical Writings of Descartes by Cottingham, Stoothoff, and Murdoch, this anthology of essential texts contains the most important and widely studied of those writings, including the Discourse and Meditations and substantial extracts from the Regulae, Optics, Principles, Objections and Replies, Comments on a Broadsheet, and Passions of the Soul.

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. (shrink)

Philosophy begins in wonder, according to Plato and Aristotle. However, they did not expand a great deal on what precisely wonder is. Does this fact alone not raise curiosity in us as to why this passion is important? What is its role in our thinking except to end as soon as one begins conceptually delimiting its nature? The thinkers Thomas Hobbes and René Descartes both expanded upon earlier brief articulations of wonder in natural, supernatural and practical ways. By means (...) of an historical and philosophical examination of these two early modern thinkers, this article hopes to begin to answer the question: ‘What is wonder?’. (shrink)

This is a review of a book by Richard F. Hassing.

Commentators commonly assume that Descartes regards it as a function of the passions to inform us or teach us which things are beneficial and which are harmful. As a result, they tend to infer that Descartes regards the passions as an appropriate guide to what is beneficial or harmful. In this paper I argue that this conception of the role of the passions in Descartes is mistaken. First, in spite of a number of texts (...) appearing to show the contrary, I argue that Descartes does not regard it as the role of the passions to inform us about what is beneficial or harmful. Second, although Descartes calls the passions good and useful, I argue that Descartes does not think we should allow ourselves to be guided by them. When we recognize that the function of the passions is largely motivational and not informative, we can more easily understand Descartes's practical advice in The Passions of the Soul that happiness requires us to guide our passions instead of letting our passions guide us. (shrink)

I have always considered that the two questions respecting God and the Soul were the chief of those that ought to be demonstrated by philosophical rather than ...

For this special issue, dedicated to the historical break in what one might call ‘the politics of feeling’ between ancient ‘passions’ (in the ‘soul’) and modern ‘emotions’ (in the ‘mind’), I will suggest that the pivotal difference might be located instead between ancient and modern conceptions of the passions. Through new interpretations of two exemplars of these conceptions, Plato’s Phaedrus and Descartes’ Passions of the Soul, I will suggest that our politics today need to (...) return to what I term Plato’s ‘psychological virtue’ (drawing on virtue’s dual senses as ‘goodness’ and ‘power’), defined as a dynamic tension among mindful desire (nous), carnal desire (epithumia) and societal desire (thumos) achieved through rational discourse (logos). The upshot of this concept of psychological virtue, is that mind, at least via discourse, is also a desiring force, and thus capable of helping create new actions for souls in the political world. (shrink)

As suggested by the title, Descartes’ Passions of the Soul deals primarily with states of the soul that he calls ‘passions.’ This designation includes all mental states that are actively caused by the body and passively received by the soul. However, as Descartes points out to the reader, there is a more specialized or proper usage of ‘passion’ that picks out a subclass of these and which aligns more-or-less with what we might now (...) call ‘emotions.’ In this paper, I will address how Descartes classifies these ‘proper passions,’ paying special attention to how he distinguishes them from the other species of the passions in general. One of my primary aims will be to highlight an under-appreciated feature of the proper passions; namely, that they are distinct from other perceptions in their systematic divergence in terms of their distal or ‘first’ cause, their intentional object, and how they are ‘referred.’ After arguing for this distinctive feature of the proper passions, I show how it enables Descartes to provide a nuanced and multi-faceted account of our emotional experiences that incorporates external sensory perceptions, internal or bodily perceptions, and various cognitive assessments. (shrink)

Pain is an important focus for consciousness research because it is an avenue for exploring somatic awareness, emotion, and the genesis of subjectivity. In principle, pain is awareness of tissue trauma, but pain can occur in the absence of identifiable injury, and sometimes substantive tissue injury produces no pain. The purpose of this paper is to help bridge pain research and consciousness studies. It reviews the basic sensory neurophysiology associated with tissue injury, including transduction, transmission, modulation, and central representation. In (...) addition, it highlights the central mechanisms for the emotional aspects of pain, demonstrating the physiological link between tissue trauma and mechanisms of emotional arousal. Finally, we discuss several current issues in the field of pain research that bear on central issues in consciousness studies, such as sickness and sense of self. (shrink)

Traces the development of philosophical thought from the seventeenth century to today, and explores why questions of the soul figure so little in the minds of present-day technocratic intellectuals.

DESCARTES IS USUALLY CREDITED WITH THE INAUGURATION of modern philosophy. This inauguration consists in a mathematical-mechanical understanding of physics and a concern with human self-consciousness. The Passions of the Soul treats, however, fleetingly, that being which can be regarded as both an object of the mathematical physicist and of the speculative philosopher—“de toute la nature de l’homme.” The peculiarity, if not uniqueness, of this subject, who is discontinuous with the rest of nature, implies that Descartes’ words (...) in the preface—“mon dessein n’a pas est d’expliquer les Passions en Orateur, ny mesme en Philosophe moral, mais seulement en Physicien”—cannot be wholly accurate, if only because man is not simply a physical being in the Cartesian sense. Cartesian physics does away with the final cause an explanation in physics: yet the final cause, the end, is fundamental to any discussion of desire, which is essentially futural, that is, goal directed or purposive. And it is only by virtue of desire that any action results from the passions of the soul. It is thus not simply efficient causation that regulates the activity of man taken as a whole: Descartes speaks of “le machine de nostre corps” but not of “la machine qui est l’homme.”. (shrink)

Pain is an important focus for consciousness research because it is an avenue for exploring somatic awareness, emotion, and the genesis of subjectivity. In principle, pain is awareness of tissue trauma, but pain can occur in the absence of identifiable injury, and sometimes substantive tissue injury produces no pain. The purpose of this paper is to help bridge pain research and consciousness studies. It reviews the basic sensory neurophysiology associated with tissue injury, including transduction, transmission, modulation, and central representation. In (...) addition, it highlights the central mechanisms for the emotional aspects of pain, demonstrating the physiological link between tissue trauma and mechanisms of emotional arousal. Finally, we discuss several current issues in the field of pain research that bear on central issues in consciousness studies, such as sickness and sense of self. (shrink)

According to Plutarch, the theory of psychological disharmony relies on the Platonic music harmony. When Plato refers to music harmony, he means the kind of harmony where the concept of God is the source through which all beings emanate. The mental passions define the quality of human character and consequently develop the social man. As far as the Aristotelian ethical theory is concerned, morality does not condemn the passions, because it has a clear ontological and anthropological basis. The (...) Stoics stress that a trait of the human soul is sociality, and that happens because all human beings are under the law of sympathy and constitute a whole. At medieval times, Boethius portrays the middle age social conditions which also resemble with our postmodern societies. (shrink)

This chapter examines the mechanistic psychology of Descartes in the _Passions_, while also drawing on the _Treatise on Man_. It develops the idea of a Cartesian “psychology” that relies on purely bodily mechanisms by showing that he explained some behaviorally appropriate responses through bodily mechanisms alone and that he envisioned the tailoring of such responses to environmental circumstances through a purely corporeal “memory.” An animal’s adjustment of behavior as caused by recurring patterns of sensory stimulation falls under the notion (...) of “learning,” behavioristically conceived. Indeed, Descartes’s animal-machine hypothesis may well be a distant ancestor to Watsonian behaviorism, via T. H. Huxley (1884). The final two sections of the chapter take stock of what psychological capacities Descartes ascribed to mind, body, or both, and consider those capacities that we might now plausibly construe as being explicable by nonmentalistic mechanisms as opposed to those that at present remain unreducedly mentalistic. -/- This chapter derives from a lecture delivered at the University of King's College (Halifax, Nova Scotia) as part of a year-long series on Descartes and the Modern. The lecture series was co-sponsored by the programs in History of Science and Early Modern and Contemporary Studies. (shrink)

A translation by Thomas Steele Hall, an historian of physiology, of the 1664 edition of Descartes' L'Homme (ed. Claude Clerselier). Includes an introduction, review of Descartes' physiology, a synopsis of the first French edition, bibliographical materials (editions and sources of L'Homme), and extensive interpretive notes. Also incorporates the French text of 1664 of L'Homme. Forward by I. B. Cohen.

"Rene Descartes is often called the 'Father of Modern Philosophy.' The profound controversies that his doctrines have engendered are alone sufficient to establish his eminence. Yet if he is to be paid a due respect, it is necessary to understand him on his own terms- to distinguish his doctrines from myriad notions labeled 'Cartesian.' The quest for certainty may be a constitutional imperative for every philosopher; in the case of Descartes it was an acknowledged passion. Thus there is (...) no more fitting approach to him than to study seriously his claims to having attained certainty regarding what he took to be the questions of metaphysics, namely, the questions of the existence of God and of the nature of the human mind."--The Preface. (shrink)

According to the standard Aristotelian doctrine of the identity of passion and action (Ipa), a passion and the action with which it is identified are distinguished through a distinction of reason, and both passion and action are located in the patient. Descartes has recently been interpreted by some scholars to be rejecting Ipa in favor of a view that throws into contention a dualistic interpretation of his philosophy of mind. This article contends that Descartes did hold Ipa, albeit (...) expressed in his own metaphysical vocabulary of substance and mode. On this interpretation, (1) a passion and the action with which it is identified are distinguished through a conceptual distinction or distinction of reason and (2) the passion and the action constitute one and the same mode which is locatedin the patient. This result is significant first, because it shows Descartes's retention of a fundamentally Aristotelian understanding of the metaphysical categories of passion and action and second, because it removes some of the support for recent interpretations on which Descartes is seen in the Passions of the Soul to diverge from a dualistic view of mind and body. (shrink)

By pushing Descartes to more clearly explain the union of body and soul beyond the functioning of a ‘strong’ passion, namely sadness, Elisabeth wants Descartes to review his idea of the passions, and his understanding of the ‘theory of the four humors’. This chapter aims at showing that Descartes turns away from Galen’s theory of the humors, which he globally adopts in the 1633 Treatise of Man. With the shift in his conceptualization of the humors (...) between this Treatise and the Treatise of the Passions (1649), Descartes analyzed more specifically the inner feelings, consciousness, and the passions, by considering that a man is not simply a body, but a psychophysical being, with a body and a soul. (shrink)

This essay represents an initial attempt to understand the interrelationship of mortality and subjectivity, passion and death, as they are explored in the works of Sartre, Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. From the very first discussions of the passions by Greek philosophers such as Aristotle, passion has held a liminal position: manifested in both body and soul, it transgresses the boundaries of psyche and soma and is especially difficult to categorize. It is not possible to work on passion without (...) exploring the mind/body relationship; and the question of human mortality is the paradigmatic locus where this relationship is most intensely exposed. In this essay, I examine these questions through a few selected texts, and in particular Nancy's Corpus and ‘L'Intrus’. (shrink)

The Elzevirs printed Descartes' philosophical works in quarto format six times between 1644 and 1677, and the parts of each ed. were sold together and separately, in many different combinations; cf. Willems, 1008. The present configuration of texts consists of the first 3 works of the 1650 (2nd) ed.--the Principia, Specimina, and Passiones animae-- to which has been added the 1654 ed. of the Meditationes.