DESCARTES ON THE ETHICAL RELIABILITY OF THE PASSIONS: A MOREAN READING Forthcoming, Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy (original) (raw)
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Never Let the Passions Be Your Guide: Descartes and the Role of the Passions
British Journal for The History of Philosophy, vol. 21, issue 3, pp. 459-477, 2012
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.
DESCARTES ON MORAL JUDGMENT AND THE POWER OF THE PASSIONS
Essays on Neuroscience and Political Theory: Thinking the Body Politic, 2012
While neuroscientists today speak of neural firings, pathways, and maps, Descartes spoke of animal spirits, brain traces, and representations. While neuroscientists today are beginning to think about the importance and role of the emotions in decision making, Descartes argued for the necessity of passions in moral judgment and action. If ever there was a thinker whose theory of the passions was grounded in the science of his day, and whose consequences for morals and politics was envisioned, it was Descartes. Contrary to the typical emphasis on Descartes’ rationalism and dualism, contemporary neuroscientists and political theorists would benefit much from a study of his account of the passions. For the passions are by nature good, and it is our job to avoid their excess and misuse in life. Reason and the passions must work in concert to achieve a good and fortunate life.
Generosity and Mechanism in Descartes's Passions
Descartes's mechanistic account of the passions is sometimes dismissed as one which lacks the resources to adequately explain the cognitive aspect of emotion. By some, he is taken to be "feeling theorist", reducing the passions to a mere awareness of the physiological state of the soul-body union. If this reading of Descartes's passions is correct, his theory fails not only because it cannot account for the intentional nature of the passions, but also because the passions cannot play the role in Descartes's moral theory they are meant to play. I argue that Descartes's account is not best read as a feeling theory. I defend a reading of the Cartesian passions which acknowledges their mechanistic nature, arguing that for Descartes, passions are modes of the soul with cognitive significance, they are perceptions of relational axiological properties. Thus, Descartes's theory of the passions has the resources to connect it with an account of good conduct...
Descartes's Passions of the Soul
Philosophy Compass, 2006
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.
Passions, Virtue, and Rational Life
Philosophy and Social Criticism
Neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalists argue that moral norms are natural norms that apply to human beings. A central issue for neo-Aristotelians is to determine what belongs to the good human life; the question is complicated, since we take up a diversity of different lives, many of which seem good, and it seems unclear what the human species-characteristic life really is. The Aristotelian tradition gives some guidance on this question, however, because it describes us as rational animals with intellectual and appetitive powers; the perfection of those powers is what makes us good qua human. This is especially well spelled out in Thomas Aquinas; he takes moral virtues of courage and temperance to be perfections of our sense appetites, a power of going for things presented as good through our senses. These virtues thereby shape our passions, specifically the passions of fear, daring and concupiscent love, which are a result of the sense appetites pursuing what appears as good. This view provides a framework for virtue, which can then be taken as the perfections of distinct powers shared by all human beings, though actualized in a variety of ways. In this article, I will focus on the passion of fear, which I here describe, following Aquinas, as a movement of sense appetite away from evils that are difficult or impossible to avoid. My focus will be on showing that this passion is necessary, irreplaceable by our cognitive powers, and that the underlying sensitive appetites that produce fear must be perfected for any human being to count as good.
Azafea: revista de filosofía, ISSN 0213-3563, Nº. 16, 2014 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Filosofía práctica y emociones), págs. 21-37, 2014
One of the most relevant topics in the Aristotelian moral philosophy for contemporary ethics is the reflection about emotional motivation and the link established between emotions and moral virtue. The Aristotelian vocabulary, that said, is unfortunately quite unclear as to that respect. In this paper, we will try to outline a taxonomy of the emotional lexicon in order to set up the semantic borders between desire and passions. Having established these limits, we may advance some of the most relevant features without which we would not be able to interpret correctly the Aristotelian theory of action and his conception of virtue. In order to attain this goal we will examine the motivational role of passions, the epistemological implications of desire and the occasional relation of synonymy between these notions. RESUMEN Uno de los asuntos de la filosofía moral de Aristóteles que tiene más relevancia para la ética contemporánea es la reflexión sobre la motivación emocional, así como sobre el vínculo que se establece entre las emociones
Memory and the Passions in Descartes’ Philosophy
History of Philosophy Quarterly , 2011
This paper examines the relation between passions and memory in Descartes’ theory of passions. Memory plays two different roles in relation to passions in Descartes’ work: it is an integral part of our experience of passions and it is crucial for our ability to control them. Descartes acknowledges that memory is relevant both to physical chain of causes leading up to an experience of passions well as to the experience of passions itself. However, he does not articulate a precise connection between his theory of memory and theory of passions, and therefore does not account for the specific ways in which memory can play a part in the origin of passions, experience and the possibility of modifying them.