Walter Charleton’s often overlooked treatise, The Natural History of the Passions (1674), offers an eclectic and unique engagement in the seventeenth-century debate about the nature and purpose of...

Scholars have long recognised that Mary Astell builds her feminist critique of society on a foundation of Cartesian views about human nature and the passions. At the same time, the full extent of the influence of Descartes’ view of embodiment on the solution Astell proposes in her Serious Proposal to the Ladies is only beginning to come to light. In this paper, I contribute to this ongoing project by arguing that Astell builds on Descartes’ ideas by addressing a blind spot (...) in his view, namely, that that the embodied self is socially situated, and that therefore, our social context plays a crucial formative role in the development of our passions. In doing so, I show Astell extends Cartesian philosophy beyond an egalitarian feminist critique of society, but also to a positive political theory offering a solution to the problems she identifies. Thusly, Astell shows the political potential of Cartesian philosophy as a framework for social critique and to seek solutions to the problems such a critique can bring out. (shrink)

My main concern in this paper is to develop and defend an account of why we ought to devote our lives to virtue—of the ground or reason for why we ought to do so—according to René Descartes. On my account, the answer is that we thereby, and indeed only thereby, do everything in our power to promote our own degree of intrinsic perfection or goodness. Descartes’s moral philosophy, as I understand it, thus constitutes a form of ethical perfectionism. While I (...) am not the first to interpret Descartes as an ethical perfectionist, there is as of yet no detailed account in the literature of what his particular form of ethical perfectionism would then entail. This is something that I hope to remedy here. (shrink)

This book aims at six important conceptual tools developed by philosophers. The author develops each particular view in a chapter, hoping to constitute at the end a concise, interesting and easily readable whole. These concepts are: 1. Ethics and realism: elucidation of the distinction between understanding and explanation – the lighthouse type of normativity. 2. Leadership, antirealism and moral psychology – the lightning rod type of normativity. 3. Bright light on self-identity and positive reciprocity – the reciprocity type of normativity. (...) 4. The virtue of generosity and its importance for inclusive education – the divine will type of normativity. 5. Ethical education as normative philosophical perspective. The normativity of self-transformation in education. 6. Aesthetics as expression of human freedom and concern for the whole world in which we live. (shrink)

What explains people's propensity to ask existential questions that they have little hope of resolving, such as: Why are we here? What, if any, is our purpose? What is the structure of the universe? That humans engage in these endeavors has long puzzled evolutionary theorists, as they go beyond the immediate demands of fending for ourselves, seeking safety, finding food, and reproducing, which occupy the daily lives of other animals. In this book, philosopher Helen De Cruz draws on a wide (...) range of disciplines and thinkers, from Aristotle and 12th-century Muslim philosopher Ibn Tufayl to Jewish thinker Abraham Heschel and science writer Rachel Carson, showing how awe and wonder lie at the heart of such existential questions. She argues that there is an emotional basis to this drive for inquiry, as wonder and awe are epistemic emotions that help us think about big-picture questions and that motivate the answers we provide to those questions. (shrink)

Bien que Descartes n’emploie que rarement les mots officium ou « devoir », sa morale confère une place centrale à la notion d’action appropriée, dans un sens qui rappelle le kathekon des stoïciens. Cette notion enveloppe les devoirs de l’être humain envers Dieu et envers les autres êtres humains, ainsi que les actions qui trouvent leur justification dans le fait qu’elles favorisent la conservation et la santé du corps. Tout en relevant ces parallèles, je montre également que Descartes, dans son (...) analyse de la vertu et des passions, s’écarte des doctrines stoïciennes ; divergence que j’explique en partie par l’acceptation de la tripartition des biens (bien moral, biens du corps, biens extérieurs) que rejettent les stoïciens. (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)

This paper examines Descartes’ account of hatred. Descartes holds that individuals should not hate, because hatred separates us from goods, causes sadness, and produces vicious character traits. Although some scholars argue that hatred is necessary to protect the body, I argue that Descartes holds that hatred is not necessary to protect the body, because there are other means of protecting the body that do not involve hatred. I conclude this paper by showing the place of hatred in Descartes’ broader moral (...) theory, especially his emphasis on the wellbeing of the soul and the virtue of generosity. (shrink)

Descartes claims that we can love God sensuously. However, it is prima facie unclear how this is possible, given that he is also committed to the impossibility of sensing or imagining God. In this essay, I show that Descartes has the metaphysical and psychophysical resources necessary to alleviate this tension. First, I discuss Descartes’s account of the intellectual love of God, demonstrating that the intellectual love of God constitutively involves the love of God’s creation. Second, I argue that an image (...) of God’s creation is sufficient for communicating the intellectual love of God to the body, so as to produce a sensuous love of God. And third, I discuss Descartes’s reasons for developing an account of the sensuous love of God. (shrink)

In this paper, I address two widespread misconceptions about Descartes’s theory of love. Descartes defines love as a passion that ‘incites [the soul] to join in volition to the objects that appear to be suitable to it’. Several commentators assume joining in volition is an act of judgment, since forming judgments is the primary function of the will in the Meditations. However, I argue joining in volition is an act of imagining a whole one forms with an object of love. (...) I draw on Descartes’s account of volition in The Passions of the Soul to show forming images in one’s mind qualifies as a volition, on his view. Second, commentators often assume joining in volition is an essential part of love. However, I argue joining in volition is not an essential part of love because love is not identical to joining in volition, and love does not necessitate the soul to join in volition. (shrink)

In the Fourth Meditation, Descartes famously treats the indifference of the will (roughly, ambivalence of reasons) as the source of error, which many read as oddly suggesting that the will judges arbitrarily. In his letter to Elisabeth dated 1st September 1645, however, he expressly takes passions to be the source of error, saying that passions move the will to judge erroneously by misrepresenting the value of objects. Although these two accounts focus on different kinds of error – theoretical and practical (...) error, respectively – I argue that Descartes is best understood as extending the second account also to the source of theoretical error. On my reading, the first account does not imply that erroneous judgements are simply arbitrary, but it leaves out an explanation why we judge at the time we do, when we could (and should) continue to inquire insofar as we have not yet gathered sufficient evidence. The second account fills in this lacuna by giving an explanation in terms of passions. I further argue that the schematic nature of the first account is due partly to the structure of the Meditations, but mainly to the fact that Descartes has not yet systematically examined the nature of passions there. (shrink)

A revisionary reading of Descartes's epistemology has emerged in the literature. Some commentators have argued that Descartes subscribes to passionate epistemology, which claims that epistemic progress in the Meditations requires contributions from the meditator's passions. This paper argues that the passions cannot perform any epistemic work in the Meditations. As such, the meditator's passions do not require us to revise our canonical understanding of the Meditations as an exercise of pure thought. Furthermore, we need not abandon the standard claim that (...) ethical practice emerges in the tree of philosophy only after metaphysics and epistemology have been established. (shrink)