Philosophy And The Passions

The subject of the passions has always haunted Western philosophy and, more often than not, aroused harsh judgments. For the passions represent a force of excess and lawlessness in humanity that produces troubling, confusing paradoxes.In this book, noted European philosopher Michel Meyer offers a wide-ranging exegesis, the first of its kind, that systematically retraces the history of philosophic conceptions of the passions in the work of such thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, and Freud. The great ruptures that led to passion's condemnation as sin, and to its romantic exultation as the truth of existence, are meticulously registered and the logic governing them astutely explicated.Meyer thus provides new insight into an age-old dilemma: Does passion torture people because it blinds them, or, on the contrary, does it permit them to apprehend who and what we really are?

The passions have long been condemned as a creator of disturbance and purveyor of the temporary loss of reason, but as Remo Bodei argues in Geometry of the Passions, we must abandon the perception that order and disorder are in a constant state of collision. By means of a theoretical and historical analysis, Bodei interprets the relationship between passion and reason as a conflict between two complementary logics. Geometry of the Passions investigates the paradoxical conflict-collaboration between passions and reason, and between individual and political projects. Tracing the roles passion and reason have played throughout history, including in the political agendas of Descartes, Hobbes, and the French Jacobins, Geometry of the Passions reveals how passion and reason may be used as a vehicle for affirmation rather than self-enslavement.

TABLE OF CONTENTS: Translator's Introduction Introduction by Genevieve Rodis-Lewis The Passions of the Soul: 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

Throughout the history of moral, political, and legal philosophy, many have portrayed passions and emotions as being opposed to reason and good judgment. At the same time, others have defended passions and emotions as tempering reason and enriching judgment, and there is mounting empirical evidence linking emotions to moral judgment. In Passions and Emotions, a group of prominent scholars in philosophy, political science, and law explore three clusters of issues: “Passion & Impartiality: Passions & Emotions in Moral Judgment”; “Passion & Motivation: Passions & Emotions in Democratic Politics”; and “Passion & Dispassion: Passions & Emotions in Legal Interpretation.” This timely, interdisciplinary volume examines many of the theoretical and practical legal, political, and moral issues raised by such questions.

In recent years the humanities, social sciences and neuroscience have witnessed an 'affective turn, ' especially in discourses around post-Fordist labor, economic and ecological crises, populism and identity politics, mental health, and political struggle. This new awareness would be unthinkable without the pioneering work of Gilles Deleuze, who replaced judgment with affect as the very material movement of thought: every concept is an affective experience, a becoming. Besides entirely active affects, the highest practice of thought, there is no thought without passive affects or passions. Instead of a calm and rational philosophy of passions, Deleuzian thought is therefore inseparable from "isolated and passionate cries" that deny what everybody knows and what nobody can deny: "every true thought is an aggression." This inseparability of reason and passion is by no means an anti-intellectualist or irrationalist stance. Rather, it is critical, since it protects reason from its self-imposed stupidity (bêtise) by relating it to the unthought forces that condition it. And it is clinical, because thought becomes possessed by a power of selection. The purely active, i.e. free-floating, unrecorded desire, is never enough to produce a consistent relation to the future, which is why we need the passions to give us an initial orientation, to force and enable us to think. Passions are the beliefs, perceptions, representations, and opinions that attach us to the world; they make up the very material of which our lives and thoughts are composed. Instead of truth as the ultimate criterion of judgment, the only principle according to which affective becomings can be selected and evaluated is the extent to which they proliferate joy. Spinoza and Marx show how the recruitment of desire traditionally takes place through the tyrants and priests who inspire sad passions in us. Similarly, the work of Deleuze and Guattari on capitalism and schizophrenia can be read as an encyclopedia of the passions that constitute the affective infrastructure of the socius of contemporary capitalism. If it takes a lot of inventiveness or imagination to be able to diagnose our present becomings, this is because becomings are always composites of joyful and sad passions. Capitalism could not exist if it did not also inspire happiness, love, courage, and perhaps even beatitude. That is why, today, we witness "the spectacle of the happily dominated" (Frédéric Lordon) of the self-entrepreneur, the managerial class, the flex worker, the citizen-consumer, the bean-roasting hipster, and the self-managed team. It is within this field of contradictory and heterogeneous passions that the authors of this volume pursue the diagnosis of our past and present becomings. Their contributions add up to a systematic taxonomy of the passions and indicate their importance for a thinking that reaches beyond itself. TABLE OF CONTENTS // IntroductionCeciel Meiborg & Sjoerd van Tuinen "Everywhere There Are Sad Passions" Gilles Deleuze and the Unhappy ConsciousnessMoritz Gansen To Have Done with the Judgment of 'Reason': Deleuze's Aesthetic OntologySamantha Bankston Closed Vessels and Signs: Jealousy as a Passion for RealityArjen Kleinherenbrink The Drama of Ressentiment: the Philosopher versus the PriestSjoerd van Tuinen The Affective Economy: Producing and Consuming Affects in Deleuze and GuattariJason Read Deleuze's Transformation of the Ideology-Critique Project: Noology CritiqueBenoît Dillet Passion, Cinema and the Old MaterialismLouis-Georges Schwartz Death of Deleuze, Birth of PassionDavid U.B. Liu

'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.

Passion and Action explores the place of the emotions in seventeenth-century understandings of the body and mind, and the role they were held to play in reasoning and action. Interest in the passions pervaded all areas of philosophical enquiry, and was central to the theories of many major figures, including Hobbes, Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Pascal, and Locke. Yet little attention has been paid to this topic in studies of early modern thought. Susan James surveys the inheritance of ancient and medieval doctrines about the passions, then shows how these were incorporated into new philosophical theories in the course of the seventeenth century. She examines the relation of the emotions to will, knowledge, understanding, desire, and power, offering fresh analyses and interpretations of a broad range of texts by little-known writers as well as canonical figures, and establishing that a full understanding of these authors must take account of their discussions of our affective life. Passion and Action also addresses current debates, particularly those within feminist philosophy, about the embodied character of thinking and the relation between emotion and knowledge. This ground-breaking study throws new light upon the shaping of our ideas about the mind, and provides a historical context for burgeoning contemporary investigations of the emotions.

Elizabeth S. Radcliffe presents an original interpretation of David Hume's famous theory of action and motivation, according to which passion and reason cannot be opposed over the direction of action. She argues that according to Hume beliefs cannot move us to action without feeling, and she explores the implications for Hume's theory of morality.