Descartes is often accused of having fragmented the human being into two independent substances, mind and body, with no clear strategy for explaining the apparent unity of human experience. Deborah Brown argues that, contrary to this view, Descartes did in fact have a conception of a single, integrated human being, and that in his view this conception is crucial to the success of human beings as rational and moral agents and as practitioners of science. The passions are pivotal in (...) this, and in a rich and wide-ranging discussion she examines Descartes' place in the tradition of thought about the passions, the metaphysics of actions and passions, sensory representation, and Descartes' account of self-mastery and virtue. Her study is an important and original reading not only of Descartes' account of mind-body unity but also of his theory of mind. (shrink)

The intellectualist position held by structuralists does not explain the extremes of emotional reaction to the disruption of social categories. An approach from neuroscience based on the functions of the limbic system in the creation of long‐term memory through the role of the hippocampus and REM sleep is proposed to account for the emotive loading of cognitive categories.

Maxine Greene is arguably the most important philosopher of education in the US today, but until now she has not been the subject of sustained scholarly analysis and investigation. This study of Green's contribution is organized from several points of view: studies of her four books; studies of the intellectual and aesthetic influences upon her theory; and her influence on the various specialization within the broad field of education-the teaching of English, arts education, philosophy of education, curriculum studies, religious education, (...) cognitive theory, and theory of teaching. (shrink)

Sean Greenberg - Descartes and the Passionate Mind - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.3 499-500 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Sean Greenberg University of California Irvine Deborah J. Brown. Descartes and the Passionate Mind. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xi + 231. Cloth, $85.00. In the past two decades, Descartes's last work, The Passions of the Soul, has received considerable attention from Descartes (...) scholars. In the first English-language monograph on the Passions, Deborah Brown mounts a case for the work's philosophical significance. Brown takes Descartes's treatment of the passions to extend the discussion of the.. (shrink)

Is Descartes the most misunderstood philosopher in the history of philosophy? To many of us in the business of Descartes scholarship, it certainly seems so. Time and time again, we find ourselves faced with pronouncements about one or another of Descartes's 'errors' — whether the shortcomings of the theater model of consciousness, or the pernicious after-effects of a foundationalism devoted to the transparency of the mental, or the shocking vilification of the body and emotions. Typically these pronouncements are paired with (...) exhortations to overcome the Cartesian X, where 'X' stands for whatever item crucial to enlightenment is currently most misunderstood. That X is some term rarely used and drastically .. (shrink)

DeLancey shows that our understanding of emotion provides essential insight on key issues in philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence. He offers us a bold new approach to the study of the mind based on the latest scientific research and provides an accessible overview of the science of emotion.

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)

Passion, Romance, and Qing: The World of Emotions and States of Mind in Peony Pavilion. By Tian Yuan Tan and Paolo Santangelo. Emotions and States of Mind in East Asia, vol. 4. 3 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Pp. x + 1555. €349, $453.

Descartes's notion of subjectivity changed the way characters would be written, performed by actors, and received by audiences. His coordinate system reshaped how theatrical space would be conceived and built. His theory of the passions revolutionized our understanding of the emotional exchange between spectacle and spectators. Yet theater scholars have not seen Descartes's transformational impact on theater history. Nor have philosophers looked to this history to understand his reception and impact. After Descartes, playwrights put Cartesian characters on the stage and (...) thematized their rational workings. Actors adapted their performances to account for new models of subjectivity and physiology. Critics theorized the theater's emotional and ethical benefits in Cartesian terms. Architects fostered these benefits by altering their designs. _The Mind-Body Stage_ provides a dazzlingly original picture of one of the most consequential and confusing periods in the histories of modern theater and philosophy. Interdisciplinary and comparatist in scope, it uses methodological techniques from literary study, philosophy, theater history, and performance studies and draws on scores of documents from several countries. (shrink)

The philosophers of the Hellenistic schools in ancient Greece and Rome (Epicureans, Stoics, Sceptics, Academics, Cyrenaics) made important contributions to the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of psychology. This volume, which contains the proceedings of the Fifth Symposium Hellenisticum, describes and analyses their contributions on issues such as: the nature of perception, imagination and belief; the nature of the passions and their role in action; the relationship between mind and body; freedom and determinism; the role of pleasure (...) as a goal; the effects of poetry on belief and passion. Written with a high level of historical and philosophical scholarship, the essays are intended both for classicists and for specialists interested in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Revisiting the generally accepted notion of psycho-physical parallelism in Spinoza, Chantal Jaquet offers a new analysis of the relation between body and mind. Looking at a range of Spinoza's texts, and using an original methodology, she analyses their unity in action through affects, actions and passions.

Hume’s distinction between the calm and violent passions is one whose boundaries are not entirely clear. However, it is crucial to understanding his motivational theory and to identifying an unusual virtue he calls “strength of mind,” the motivational prevalence of the calm passions over the violent. In this paper, I investigate the boundaries of the calm passions and consider the constitution of strength of mind and why Hume regards it as an admirable trait. These are provocative issues for (...) two reasons. First, it seems as though one might exhibit the prevalence of calm over violent passions, even if the prevailing calm passions are vicious traits of character. Second, the natural virtues for Hume are non-moral motives that garner approval for the effects they tend to produce. But strength of mind is unique in that it is not defined in terms of a particular motive, but in terms of the causal force (strength) of any number of motives in competition with others. (shrink)

The philosophers of the Hellenistic schools in ancient Greece and Rome made important contributions to the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of psychology. This volume, which contains the proceedings of the Fifth Symposium Hellenisticum, describes and analyses their contributions on issues such as: the nature of perception, imagination and belief; the nature of the passions and their role in action; the relationship between mind and body; freedom and determinism; the role of pleasure as a goal; the effects (...) of poetry on belief and passion. Written with a high level of historical and philosophical scholarship, the essays are intended both for classicists and for specialists interested in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

The thoroughly contemporary question of the relationship between emotion and reason was debated with such complexity by the philosophers of the 17th century that their concepts remain a source of inspiration for today’s research about the emotionality of the mind. The analyses of the works of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and many other thinkers collected in this volume offer new insights into the diversity and significance of philosophical reflections about emotions during the early modern era. A focus is placed on (...) affective components in learning processes and the boundaries between emotions and reason. (shrink)

Michael Arbib was born in England, grew up in Australia, and studied at MIT where he received his PhD in Mathematics in 1963. He helped to found the Department of Computer and Information Science and the Center for Systems Neuroscience, the Cognitive Science Program, and the Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Today he is Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science, a Professor of Neuroscience and the Director of the USC Brain Project at the University (...) of Southern California. The title of his first book, Brains, Machines and Mathematics , gives a good indication of his scientific interests. For all his extensive research in these areas, however, Arbib has not ignored philosophical, social, and even theological topics . Central to his work in all of these areas is the concept of schema, and this is one of the topics that we discuss here. (shrink)

This is the latest volume in a series that has made important contributions on Hellenistic philosophy, currently the liveliest context of research in ancient philosophy. Each volume is based on a smallish conference of leading international scholars; the aim is not to generate shared work on a single issue or topic, but to produce a series of original, expert papers in a given area. A feature of the series has been to show not only that much new, good scholarship can (...) be done on Hellenistic thought, but also that the theories brought to light are philosophically powerful, when judged by the most exacting contemporary standards. How well does this volume measure up against these high expectations? (shrink)

This dissertation analyzes the three main philosophical movements which informed the intellectual world of Paul and his Greco-Roman contemporaries during the 1st century B.C.E. through the 2nd century C.E. In Part I, I analyze the moral transformation systems of the Middle Platonists , Neo-Stoics , and Greco-Roman Epicureans . I pay attention to the language of power in the analyses of Chapters 1--3, and to how power plays a salient role in philosophical discussions on the passions and on their role (...) in moral progress. What emerges from Part I are the following main conclusions: Despite the very different conceptualizations of the passions in Platonism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism, all three schools nonetheless viewed desire as a form of power and self-mastery over them as an expression of the sage's power. The power of the philosopher was the power of sight. That is, the sage saw himself and his potential errors correctly; and the sage saw the moral standard according to which one should conform. ;Part II is an attempt to show how a study of ancient philosophy of mind can help inform our understanding of Paul's letter recipients and Paul himself. The test case is the situation at Roman Corinth. Of all the philosophies of mind discussed in Part I, I make the initial case that the ideological framework which best explains the attitudes of the Corinthian strong over such issues such as sex with prostitutes is Epicurean philosophy and their ethics of the stomach. Sex is a natural desire and so is permissible in their moral framework. Finally, Chapter 5 examines extensively the external evidence for an Epicurean movement in the city of Roman Corinth. It makes the case for the presence of Epicurean converts among Corinth's urban leadership who, as immigrants, moved to Corinth from neighboring Greek cities and from Rome itself when Corinth was refound as a Roman colony in 44 B.C.E. The greatest epigraphic evidence for Corinthian Epicureans are the inscriptions dedicated to Junia Theodora and Gallio. (shrink)

Several authors have recently noted Hume’s relative silence on the virtue of strength of mind and how it is developed. In this paper I suggest that Hume had good reasons for this silence, and I argue that Hume’s discussion of artificial virtue, especially the virtue of allegiance, reveals a complex view of the limitations on human efforts at self-reform. Further, it reveals the need for government and externally-imposed regulative structures to enable the development of strength of mind. I (...) argue that because of this, strength of mind awkwardly straddles Hume’s distinction between natural and artificial virtue. I conclude that, in comparison with traditional models of self-control, Humean strength of mind is indirect, artificial, and social. (shrink)

Hume is famous for his criticism of substantial minds, free will, and self-consciousness—central elements in traditional philosophical accounts of persons. His empiricism dissolves self-inspecting minds into heaps of distinct perceptions and turns cognitive faculties into successions of causally related, discrete impressions and ideas. Whatever regularities the complex ideas and their bundles or heaps display are explained by laws of association of ideas, which are supposed to play the same role in the mental world as Newton’s laws of gravitation play in (...) physical nature. This paper explores some strands of the new science of man proposed in Hume’s Treatise, in particular his account of personal identity.. (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)

This paper examines the ongoing relevance of Hume on the mind and self or personal identity.

This chapter examines the views of seventeenth-century British philosophers on passions and affections. It explains that about 8,000 books published during this period mentioned passion and that it started with Thomas Wright's Passions of the Mind in General. The chapter also explores the intellectual basis of the writers who wrote about passion – which includes Augustinianism, Aristotelianism, stoicism, Epicureanism, and medicine – and furthermore, analyzes the relevant works of Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Henry More, and Lord Shaftesbury.

This volume contains substantially revised versions of eleven papers delivered at the Fifth Symposium Hellenisticum in France in 1989. Approaches vary from the philosophical to the historical-philological, and the scholarship is consistently excellent. The three French contributors offer exhaustive historical studies. Best of this lot is André Laks's brilliant effort to disentangle threads of the Cyrenaic tradition in Diogenes Laertius 2.8696. He argues that the later Cyrenaic Anniceris is not an innovator as has been argued recently, but that, despite his (...) emphasis on psychic pleasures, Anniceris upholds the traditional line on the primacy of somatic pleasure. The point at issue, really, is whether considering altruistic feelings like friendship and gratitude as pleasures amounts to innovating. J. -L. Labarrière traces the debates between Stoics and Academics concerning animal faculties, especially phantasia. Carlos Levy looks at how the term doxa was wielded as a polemical weapon by early Stoics, the New Academy, and Middle Platonists. Next come three fine papers on Epicurus. Gisela Striker relieves our perplexity at Epicurus's conception of complete pleasure as the absence of pain, illuminating the Epicurean distinction between "kinetic" and "static" pleasures in Cicero's De Finibus. Epicurus identifies happiness with the greatest pleasure, or complete pleasure, which is complete absence of pain--not the accumulation of particular pleasures. Epicurus's views on free agency, surviving in the fragments of book 3 of On Nature, lead Julia Annas to conclude that rationality is associated with flexibility of response and ability to learn, and that rational capacity may very well develop in ways that are not fixed by our atomic constitutions. One might quarrel with her observation that this simple commonsense view is attractive. Finally, David Furley points out that Democritus doubted the senses' ability to reveal truth, while Epicurus claimed that "all perceptions are true." Yet both atomists deny that sensible qualities exist at the level of primary elements. The explanation? Epicureans accept perceptible qualities as properties of external objects, not merely "affections" of the senses; for Democritus aisthem;ta have no reality independent of us. (shrink)

Passion and Action is an exploration of the role of the passions in seventeenth-century thought. Susan James offers fresh readings of a broad range of thinkers, including such canonical figures as Hobbes, Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Pascal, and Locke, and shows that a full understanding of their philosophies must take account of their interpretations of our affective life. This ground-breaking study throws new light upon the shaping of our ideas about the mind, knowledge, and action, and provides a historical context (...) for burgeoning current debates about the emotions. (shrink)

Hume’s ethics is concerned not only with the metaphysical status of moral qualities but equally, if not more, with the problem of determining to what extent and under what conditions issues of moral disagreement and inquiry can be decided by rational argumentation. This paper argues that Hume’s solution to the second problem is a form of perspectivism: the rational decidability of moral issues depends on the existence of shared perspectives, or sets of assumptions and correlated dispositions to feelings, and is (...) largely independent of the metaphysical status of moral qualities. An issue of disagree- ment may thus be rationally decidable among people with certain dispositions to feeling but not among others. A similar perspectivist reading is suggested for Hume’s analysis of knowledge about causes and effects. (shrink)

This paper considers I) whether Aristotle's notion of form is 'compositionally plastic' and II) whether matter is in any way to be included in the form of natural things. It pursues (I) and (II) with respect to two texts only: De Anima I-2's socalled definition of anger and the notorious young Socrates passage from Metaphysics VII.11. Neither passage supports indusion of anything material in the form and both are consistent with compositional plasticity. To thus extent the support what I call (...) the purification of form. (shrink)

Descartes retains the Aristotelian doctrine that when an agent acts on a patient, the action of the agent is one and the same as the passion in the patient. However, unlike his Aristotelian predecessors who located the agent's action in the patient, Descartes locates the agent's action in the agent. I examine briefly his motives for modifying, but not abandoning this doctrine. My central claim is that his use of this doctrine implies that he thinks there are modes straddling (...) class='Hi'>mind and body, but that such straddling modes do not conflict with his dualism, understood properly. (shrink)

David Carr argues that the intelligibility of spiritual development as an educational activity is dependent upon there being a framework of propositions that relates to spiritual experience and that there is a methodology for establishing their truth. These propositions and the accompanying methodology need to be constructed along the lines of a traditional but re-worked form of religious education. Michael Hand argues to the contrary that there can be no methodology for the evaluation of the truth claims in relation to (...) 'spiritual'propositions since they invariably psychologically, if not logically, involve reference to a transcendental being and are therefore seen as substantially matters of faith. Since the presentation of faith-based propositional knowledge is inappropriate to the secular school, the only route for spiritual education is in terms of those emotional qualities that we identify with the human 'spirit', that is, generosity, magnanimity, good heartedness, etc. In this paper it is argued that neither position is satisfactory in addressing the existential anxieties and tensions that underlie the construction of religious and other spiritually relevant forms of articulation. We do not need Carr's 'true' spiritual propositions. Analysis of spiritual discourses can take the same epistemological form as enquiry in arts criticism, one that recognises the elasticity of its propositions in terms of meaning and a fluidity in terms of its boundaries. The 'truth' of such propositions depends upon how they answer to the existential tensions felt by the pupil. Insofar as Hand's analysis is concerned, to reduce spiritual education to a form of emotional and social development neglects the clear intelligibility of spiritual discourse to the religious and non-religious minded alike. The unifying element in spiritual discourse is those existential questions that lie at its foundations. Spiritual education seeks to address these questions as ones of both passion and intelligibility, helping pupils to make choices in light of their own experience of the tensions and anxieties that are embedded within them. (shrink)

In this essay, I propose a reading of two contrasting passions, two kinds of erōs, in the "Symposium." On the one hand, there is the imperialistic desire for conquering and possessing that Alcibiades represents; and on the other hand, there is the productive love of immortal wisdom that Diotima represents. It’s not just what Alcibiades says in the Symposium, but also what he symbolizes. Alcibiades gives a speech in honor of Socrates and of his unrequited love for him, but even (...) here Alcibiades recounts his attempted seduction of Socrates as a failed conquest, as an unsuccessful attempt to violently take possession of something that Socrates has within him. Even more importantly, in 416 BCE (the dramatic date of Agathon’s symposium) Alcibiades was soon to encourage his fellow countrymen to set off on the ruinous Sicilian expedition. Alcibiades’s actions behind-the-scenes of the "Symposium" reveal the clearest manifestation of his imperialistic erōs (for political power in Athens). They also constitute some necessary background to the dialogue, which Plato’s Athenian readers would have had in mind. Where else can we catch a glimpse of this disastrous desire? It is best illustrated in Thucydides’s "History." I show that the beginnings of this political passion can already be seen in Pericles’s funeral oration (2.35-46, specifically 2.43.1) and that after Pericles’s death, Alcibiades stokes this erōs to such a fevered pitch that the Athenians agree to launch the tragic venture against Sicily. Opposed to this political passion, is Diotima’s. She tries to reorient this misguided erōs and presents an alternative form of desire for everlasting wisdom (philosophia). (shrink)

'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)

Examines Descartes's later years through the large volume of correspondence from that period, much of it with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. This correspondence was mainly concerned with the passions, mind/body dualism, the nature of the soul, automata, and the doctrine of substantial union. Mind/body dualism is discussed in the usual seventeenth‐century context of the passions, in his work Passions, which also deals at length with the problem of evil. Reviews the work Descartes undertook at the end of his (...) life—unfinished works on botany, anatomy, physiology, and a reply to Regius’ disagreement with him on the need for a metaphysical grounding for natural philosophy that expanded on his doctrine of innate ideas. (shrink)

I defend that Cartesian passions are a function—in fact, the only function—of the mind-body union responsible for guiding us in the pursuit of our (natural) perfection, a perfection that we increase by joining goods that our nature deems to be so. This view is in conflict, on one hand, with those (a majority) who have emphasized either the epistemic or survival role of our passions and, on the other and more precisely, with a recent proposal according to which Cartesian (...) passions should not be even seen as guides for happiness. Against the latter, I will attempt to show that passions perform a guiding function (1) by discriminating what is “important” for us regarding the increase of our natural perfection (which includes informing the soul about the current state of perfection both of the body and of the mind-body union); and (2) by disposing us to act (which includes proposing to the will possible ways of action to increase or maintain our perfection). Our passions are, thus, both informative and motivational. Making explicit their informative role will require, negatively, showing that this does not mean they are reliable and, positively, undertaking a study—largely absent among commentaries—of their specific intentionality. (shrink)

Ruling Passions is about human nature. It is an invitation to see human nature a certain way. It defends this way of looking at ourselves against competitors, including rational choice theory, modern Kantianism, various applications of evolutionary psychology, views that enchant our natures, and those that disenchant them in the direction of relativism or nihilism. It is a story centred upon a view of human ethical nature, which it places amongst other facets of human nature, as just one of the (...) elements which give us the manifold objects of our concerns and cares. (shrink)

Who hasn't wondered what it's like to be a dog or bird? Such questions seem unanswerable because we have no way of getting into an animal's mind. Marc Bekoff's work on animal behavior and mind draws world-wide attention for its originality and its probing into what animals might know as well as what skills are needed to live life successfully as a member of a particular species. Convinced that individuals of every species have some level of self-awareness, Bekoff (...) embarks on fascinating observations of animals playing, leaving and detecting scent-marks, solving problems, and behaving fairly toward each other.Animal Passions and Beastly Virtuesbrings together some of his path-breaking research papers, essays on science and ethics, and popular articles in order to reveal a remarkable range of animal behaviors but also to argue that the ethical treatment of animals is an especially significant issue now. (shrink)

Philosophy had either ignored or attacked psychoanalysis: such responses are neither warranted nor helpful. One hundred years after its inception, isn't it time to find out what psychoanalysis has to offer us? In Passion in Theory Robyn Ferrell does just that, and returns with some surprising answers. Concentrating on the work of Freud and Lacan, Robyn Ferrell asks why their work had been so influential in European philosophy yet so marginal in the Anglo-American circles. Passion in Theory explores their conception (...) of the relationship between mind and body, and how it provides a key to many current philosophical questions. Passion in Theory is designed for students and researchers in psychoanalysis, traditional and continental philosophy. (shrink)