Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy

ISBN-13: 9780198250135 / Angielski / Miękka / 2000 / 328 str.

James

Opis

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.

Recenzje

When philosophers write about the importance of the emotions today, they usually begin by condemning earlier philosophers for separating the emotions from reason (and then all but ignoring them). Nothing could be further from the approach of Susan James ... in this beautifully written study. Her subtle and erudite interpretations of major texts of the seventeenth century show that the passions were at the heart of early modern philosophy ... her recovery of the treatment of the passions and of action in a wealth of authors from Descartes to Locke provides a perspective from which we can free ourselves a little from the unsatisfactory way we view the emotions today, and so enables us to think differently about their proper place in a sound human life. Her study also shows how early modern philosophers were open to and deeply influenced by areas of European culture other than philosophy where the emotions were at centre stage.

O autorze

Susan James is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Girton College; she has also held positions at the University of Connecticut and the Australian National University. She is a general editor of the series Oxford Readings in Feminism.