Roman Stoicism Research Articles

Emotions and Morality: The View from Classical Antiquity

This paper shows the close relationship between morality and emotions, as emotions were defined and understood by classical Greek and Roman philosophers (specifically, Aristotle and the Roman Stoic Seneca). Particular attention is paid to the nature of anger, and also to the distinction between full-fledged emotions, which depend on rational judgments and which, accordingly, only human beings are capable of experiencing, and what the Stoics called “pre-emotions,” which were common to human beings and other animals.

Mixing Bodily Fluids: Hobbes’s Stoic God

The pantheon of seventeenth-century European philosophy includes some remarkably heterodox deities, perhaps most famously Spinoza’s deus-sive-natura. As in ethics and natural philosophy, early modern philosophical theology drew inspiration from classical sources outside the mainstream of Christianized Aristotelianism, such as the highly immanentist, naturalistic theology of Greek and Roman Stoicism. While the Stoic background to Spinoza’s pantheist God has been more thoroughly explored, I maintain that Hobbes’s corporeal God is the true modern heir to the Stoic theology. The Stoic and Hobbesian gods are necessitarian, entirely corporeal, and thoroughly intermixed with ordinary bodies, while also supremely intelligent, providential, and good. And both gods serve as the ultimate source of diversity and change in a material world divested of Aristotelian forms and causes. Unfortunately, scholars on both sides of the long debate about the sincerity of Hobbes’s theism have not taken very seriously his late articulation of a corporeal theology. One probable reason for this dismissive attitude is a lack of thorough investigation of the historical precedents for such an unusual godhead available to Hobbes. The first part of this article attempts to establish a close congruence between the Stoic and Hobbesian gods. The second part traces the likely sources for Hobbes’s Stoic theology in his intellectual context.

BRICOLAGE AND THE PURITY OF TRADITIONS: Engaging the Stoics for Contemporary Christian Ethics

ABSTRACTThis essay is a response to C. Kavin Rowe's critique of my 2011 argument that certain dimensions of Roman Stoic ethics are at work in Jonathan Edwards's moral thought. Rowe raises questions about the act of selectively retrieving ideas from a philosophical tradition to support constructive work in another tradition. I argue for the importance of acknowledging how Christian thought has been shaped by what Jeffrey Stout describes as moral bricolage, the selective retrieval of ideas from various traditions, and I contend that this bricolage can continue to be a fruitful means through which Christian ethics engages external traditions. Moreover, the importance of Stoicism's retrieval in early modern philosophy makes the work of eighteenth‐century theologians such as Edwards a particularly valuable resource for exploring the plausibility of Christian engagement with the Stoics.

Happiness studies in ancient Greece? A 2nd century skeptic's challenge

Can the study of philosophy lead to happiness—whether after death, as Socrates claimed, in Plato's dialogue ‚The Phaedo‛, or while one is still alive, as Epicurus, the Roman Stoics, and other ancient thinkers maintained? In his dialogue ‚Hermotimus or on Philosophical Schools‛, the second-century satirist Lucian of Samosata cast a skeptical eye on all such teachings. How can students know which of the many paths to happiness and wisdom to choose, which guide to trust? Might signing on with any one teacher be a waste of time? What if some are charlatans who not only fail to provide a path to happiness but actually mislead and profiteer from their hapless charges? I argue that Lucian's cautionary attitude is equally useful today for anyone confronted with the profusion of courses, books and websites offering help in finding or 'choosing' happiness. I would now wish to include his irreverent voice among the many that I found helpful in writing Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science. But I would hope to invite him, in turn, to go beyond his skeptical approach and reach also for the sympathetic understanding of different experiences and perspectives needed to deepen one's understanding of happiness.

CONSENT, CONVERSION, AND MORAL FORMATION: Stoic Elements in Jonathan Edwards's Ethics

ABSTRACTThe contemporary revival of virtue ethics has focused primarily on retrieving central moral commitments of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and the Neoplatonist traditions. Christian virtue ethicists would do well to expand this retrieval further to include the writings of the Roman Stoics. This essay argues that the ethics of Jonathan Edwards exemplifies major Stoic themes and explores three noteworthy points of intersection between Stoic ethics and Edwards's thought: a conception of virtue as consent to a benevolent providence, the identification of virtue as a singular and transformative good, and an account of moral formation as simultaneously self‐directed and received. Common ground between Edwards and the Stoics illustrates the value of recognizing Stoic moral thought as a philosophical framework that can enhance and undergird Christian ethicists' understandings of moral development and the nature of virtue.

Vico and Naples: The Urban Origins of Modern Social Theory (review)

Reviewed by: Vico and Naples: The Urban Origins of Modern Social Theory Thora Ilin Bayer Barbara Ann Naddeo. Vico and Naples: The Urban Origins of Modern Social Theory. Ithaca, NYLondon: Cornell University Press, 2011. Pp. xii + 300. Cloth, $49.95. This work concerns the development of the thought of Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) during approximately the first half of his career at the University of Naples, from his appointment as Professor of Rhetoric in 1699 to the appearance of his First New Science in 1725. It concentrates on Vico’s short history of the failed coup against Spanish rule in Naples, his series of inaugural university orations on pedagogy, and the three books of his work on universal law, the Diritto universale. Professor Naddeo’s work concludes with a few pages of remarks on the New Science of 1725 but excludes any discussion of the text for which Vico is most known and that accounts for his designation as the founder of the philosophy of history—the New Science of 1730/1744. [End Page 498] The aim of Naddeo’s work is to counter the received view of Vico as a thinker whose ideas are independent of the social and political forces in Naples and his own time. This view of Vico as a politically disengaged, even naïve, thinker goes back at least as far as the interpretations of Benedetto Croce and Fausto Nicolini. Naddeo brings to bear an impressive analysis of archival and historical evidence to support her presentation of Vico as an engaged and informed thinker, reacting to the politics of Naples and to rising strains of Enlightenment social theory. She connects Vico’s pedagogical ideas in his university orations to a view of global citizenship based on Roman Stoicism, and she regards Vico’s historical reinterpretation of Roman law in the Diritto universale as forming an ideal of the polis to place against the Naples of his time. Naddeo views Vico’s interpretation of natural law as “a most sophisticated diagnosis of the wrongs inherent to the metropolitan community that was intended to rally the judiciary to the cause of social justice” (149). Naddeo credits Vico with a novel and early employment of “society” at the advent of modern social theory. Vico used the term only once in his third university oration, but in so doing, it introduced the idea of an all-inclusive collectivity of humanity. Naddeo’s work is a welcome corrective to the view of Vico as a lone thinker completely out of his own time. It is a view to which Vico himself contributed when in his autobiography he claims he returned to Naples from his years of serving as tutor to the children of the Rocca family south of Naples as “a stranger in his own land” and that even after the publication of his New Science he remained quite unnoticed. Naddeo is clear that much of Vico’s presentation of his activity in Naples is not to be taken at face value, at least during the years her study covers. In large measure, Naddeo’s work is an intellectual biography, but one that does not offer any view of Vico’s development up to his appointment at the University. What were the factors in Vico’s early thought and education that led him into these political views? How did Vico pass from the deeply felt Lucretian sentiments of his first published work, the poem “Affetti di un disperato” (1692), to the Stoic conception of global citizenship of Naddeo’s account? A question the reader may face is whether or not this corrective to the understanding of Vico is an over-corrective. Once Vico’s pedagogical philosophy and philosophy of law as well as his personal motivations and events of his professional career are interpreted solely in political terms, no other forms of explanation may seem significant. Vico comes forth just as a distinctive thinker of his own time and place. But what of the meaning of Vico’s views of human education and human nature as such? What of Vico’s views of the law as part of human wisdom—the knowledge of things divine and human—as such? As...

Hannah Arendt's Tactlessness: Reading Eichmann in Jerusalem

Thus you will avoid hatred from the offence by harming nobody gratuitously: from which sensus communis will protect you. Seneca There is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible by means of liberal rationalization. In each one of us, there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense. Hannah Arendt I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Herman Melville Is it possible to envisage a viable theory of tact in the humanities? Tact has a long history, and for writers like Hans-Georg Gadamer it is bound up with the recovery of the Roman idea of the sensus communis over the course of the eighteenth century, from Shaftesbury through to Kant, and the impact of that recovery on the birth of the human sciences. For the Roman Stoics, the sensus communis implied an idea of social conduct. In the Stoic theory of judgement, according to Gadamer, '[t]he grasp and moral control of the concrete situation require subsuming what is given under the universal--that is, the goal that one is pursuing so that the right thing may result'. (1) Such practical wisdom included an awareness of how to avoid giving offence, and more expansively an ability to make judgments of what is right and proper in social situations such as the giving of gifts. (2) As Gadamer argues in the first chapter of Truth and Method, during the nineteenth century the different meanings that had come to be attached to the ancient idea of the sensus communis (from a feeling for the common interest of mankind in Shaftesbury to a model for the subjective universality of aesthetic judgement in Kant) provided justification for the emerging human sciences. A kind of 'tact,' in Gadamer's account, came to distinguish the kinds of judgement involved in the writing of, say, history, from the inductive reasoning of the natural sciences, as I will show in what follows. The writing of history, and the kind of judgements that the historian might be expected to make require tact, in order to match thinking and writing to the often traumatic objects that they describe. Writing in a 1953 response to Eric Voegelin's review of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote that '[t]he problem of style is a problem of adequacy and of response'. (3) Style, and in particular the style of writing required by an account of the pre-history and history of totalitarianism such as Arendt had written in The Origins of Totalitarianism, embodies the relation of thinking and writing to the realities of history, and notices that relation as a problem. For Hannah Arendt, doing justice to those realities means avoiding the wheedling voice of liberal 'common sense' that lurks within, and that would try to rationalise them away. Implicit in its attempt to rationalise events, such a liberal voice would seek to maintain the classical standard of a dispassionate style of historical writing sine ira et studio, a style that Arendt claimed to have abandoned, in her reply to Voegelin, 'as a methodological necessity' in The Origins of Totalitarianism (p403). To write about the concentration camps without anger, sine ira, she writes, 'is not to be 'objective,' but to condone them' (p404). The angry style of Origins thereby signals Arendt's abandonment of liberal forms of rationalisation, objectivity and dispassion that unwittingly condone the totalitarian reality that they fail to understand; and in the process it challenges an ancient opposition between reason and the passions, particularly anger. (4) To rationalise, in the light of recent events, would no longer mean primarily to avoid allowing the emotions to cloud one's judgement; to rationalise would mean now to condone what should never have happened. The angry style of The Origins of Totalitarianism resists such a move by insisting on the particularity of totalitarianism. The book's insistence and anger account for the peculiarly divergent types of emotional tone that its earliest readers found in it; the book's style tends, Arendt wrote to Voegelin, towards being 'praised as passionate and criticized as sentimental' (p403). …

In Defense of New Stoicism: Public Advocacy and Political Thought in the Age of Nero

Philosophers have rarely been on good terms with the city and its rulers. Among the rhetorical devices with which they have defended themselves and their discipline, few have proven more reliable than the Straussian technique of “philosophic politics.” This article calls attention to a defining moment in the history of this persuasive technique: Seneca the Younger's defense of Roman Stoicism in the mid-first century CE. In light of his public advocacy and political thought, the article concludes that an expansion of the concept of philosophic politics is in order. In addition to philosophical tracts and treatises, it should be widened to include the nonphilosophical works of their authors.

Toward a Non-Stoical Cosmopolitanism

Toward a Non-Stoical Cosmopolitanism

Roman Stoic Precreation Discourse

AbstractCosmological imagery figures prominently in the precreation discourse of Roman Stoics, more so than in the precreation discourse of Jewish and Christian writers of the Hellenistic-Roman period. Roman Stoics imagine a realm of eternal time and space beyond the world of ordinary human experience and understanding. What humans can know of this realm is not revealed to them by a deity who dwells there, but by the spirits of virtuous souls who speak to select family members from the places where they dwell in the afterlife. Two examples are Aeneas’ father Anchises who describes primal reality to his son in the underworld, in Book VI of Virgil’sAeneid, and Scipio Africanus, the Roman soldier and statesman, who speaks of similar matters when his grandson of the same name travels to the outermost realm of heaven in a dream, in Book VI of Cicero’sRepublic. The myth and philosophy from which Cicero and Virgil draw their images of the primordial realm make the rhetography of their precreation discourse much richer than that found in Jewish and Christian precreation discourse of the period. Also, the relationship between rhetography and rhetology is more complex in Roman Stoic discourse and poses challenges for translators and interpreters of Cicero and Virgil.

1 Tim 5:6 and the Notion and Terminology of Spiritual Death : Hellenistic Moral Philosophy in the Pastoral Epistles.

A close relationship exists between 1 Timothy and Hellenistic philosophy, especially Stoicism and (Middle) Platonism. A remarkable parallel is found between I Tim 5:1-2 and Hierocles the Stoic's doctrine of oakeiosis. A similar parallel between the notion of spiritual death, as it is expressed in 1 Tim 5:6 and in broadly contemporary authors influenced by Roman Stoicism and Middle Platonism, proves that the author of 1 Timothy knew and adapted conceptions drawn from the Hellenistic moral lore and philosophy of his day. In 1 Tim 5:6 the notion of the spiritual death of the immoral person appears connected both to Paul and to the philosophical landscape of the early Empire (Middle-Platonic and Neo-Stoic). Philo occupies an important place in this tradition, which has remarkable developments in Origen. 1 Tim 5:6 is basic for Origen's conception of spiritual death. The author of 1 Timothy has a deep knowledge of Hellenistic philosophy, especially Stoicism and Platonism, not only of single points or details, but of crucial philosophical conceptions, which he consciously employs for his own paraenetic discourse. This proves consistent with the long-recognised fact that the Pastoral Epistles represent an attempt at adapting Christian Pauline communities to their Hellenistic cultural environment and making them less suspect in the eyes of Graeco-Roman society.

Introduction: The Quest for Universality in Contemporary Context

�� ��� In this series, scholars address questions about the universality of justice with an eye to their salience within a diverse world.* The question is challenging because a deep tension lies at the center of debate over universal approaches to justice. Questions about the universality of justice, of course, have deep historical roots but also present themselves today within a distinctive political context. In Sophocles’ Antigone (written in or before 441 B.C.E.), Creon, the King of Thebes, decrees that no one shall bury the corpse of Polynices, who betrayed Thebes in civil war. Antigone buries Polynices in defiance of the order, viewing it as a sibling’s sacred duty. Against the charge that she has committed a grave crime, Antigone proclaims her action justified by dictates of justice higher than the King’s law. Creon rejects Antigone’s appeal to a standard of justice independent of the city’s law, insisting that the law of Thebes is simply what he commands. In Plato’s Republic , written roughly eighty years later, Thrasymachus insists that laws are nothing but tools that the strong use to impose their will on the weak. 1 Rulers drape laws with the exalted name of justice simply to induce compliance. The meaning of justice, then, turns on the happenstance of which party prevails in the struggle for dominance. In opposition to Thrasymachus, Socrates envisions a properly ordered society rooted in an ideal of justice. For Socrates, justice is an eternal standard, transcending the will of any ruler. Universality was a topic of debate in ancient Greece and it has been a persistent topic of debate across widely varying historical and cultural contexts. The study of American constitutionalism, for example, finds intellectual roots in Cicero and Roman Stoicism, Aquinas and medieval Scholasticism, the early British jurists Fortescue and Coke, and modern social contract theorists like Hobbes and Locke. 2 To engage the universality of justice is

Utopia, Domestication and Special Status: Marriage and Family in the Stoic Tradition

The family was a prominent aspect of early imperial ideology and enjoyed an increased status in Roman society of the period. Since Panaetius, Stoic thought provided rational support for this status by means of its oikeiosis doctrine. Roman Stoics, far from ignoring the prominence of family in their society, imbued the space of marriage with fresh content but did not agree on the issue of whether the philosopher should be exempted from this responsibility. Ambiguity on whether the sage should marry can be traced back to the Stoic founder. The scantily transmitted material on Zeno suggests a double focus in early Stoic thought, on the one hand utopian constructions of the ideal sate and ideal sage (where marriage is abolished) and on the other, ordinary reality (where the Stoic sage should marry and procreate). The abolition of property and marriage (having women and children in common) occurs frequently in so-called high utopias of the classical era, but this aspect of Stoicism diminished since the middle Stoa, together with receding expectations regarding the Stoic wise man. The Roman Stoics Musonius and Epictetus relate differently to their own tradition. Musonius pays no attention to utopia or the ideal sage, but incorporates utopian vocabulary in his defence of marriage for the philosopher, thus 'domesticating' utopia. This results in an emphasis on the marriage partnership as small-scale communism based on friendship. Epictetus retains the distinction between the ideal community of the wise and reality as is. Marriage is an essential part of the latter, but the Cynic, to whom Epictetus assigns the special status of messenger and scout of Zeus, is exempted from the responsibilities accompanying family life.

Belief and Learning in Milton's Paradise Regained

Milton's Paradise Regained is a biblical epic poem which dramatizes the Son's unwavering religious faith that leads him to resist all the temptations, including the irresistible lure into knowledge. However, its reader is sometimes at a loss by its strident denunciation of the traditional Greco-Roman learning. Milton's commitment to the traditional humanist studies (he owns the influence of Spenser, an author, on him) from his childhood and the Renaissance respect for classical literature make us somewhat doubt the explicit renunciation of classical learning. His shorter epic is so deeply embedded in the Western classical culture that the poem cannot be adequately appreciated without the knowledge of it. The poem is written in the form of an epic, whose origin is Greek literature. Milton conveys his Christian ideas through the epic form. The characterization of the protagonist, the Son, is noteworthy because despite his harsh attacks on classical literature and philosophy, he resembles some Greco-Roman figures, like the Greek heroes, Hercules or Oedipus, and the Roman Stoic, who represents endurance and reason and humanist knowledge. Endurance is a significant virtue to Christians and Stoics alike. However, the crucial Christian virtue like mercy, sacrifice, crucifixion, or resurrection is lacking in the epic's characterization of Jesus The very beginning of the poem echoes the Spenserian imitation of Virgil's Aneid. Also a great number of literary allusions to Spenser testify the influence of the secular literature on Milton's works. No matter how harshly the Son renounces the classics in praise of Christian values, the reader's knowledge of the humanist learning is necessary in order to understand the religious meaning. And the reader gets confused by Satan's characterization as having some rational traits. Paradise Regained emphasizes the worth of religion that we should prioritize over secular learning, but sometimes its reader may be uncertain about the claims.

Formal Logic vs. Philosophical Argument

The wider topic to which the content of this paper belongs is that of the relationship between formal logic and real argumentation. Of particular potential interest in this connection are held to be substantive arguments constructed by philosophers reputed equally as authorities in logical theory. A number of characteristics are tentatively indicated by the author as likely to be encountered in such arguments. The discussion centers afterwards, by way of specification, on a remarkable piece of argument quoted in Cicero’s dialog On Divination and ascribed to Stoic thinkers. The Stoics’ formal theory of inference is summarily referred to in this context, with special emphasis on their basic deductive schemata (‘indemonstrables’), some of them recognizable as links in the overall structure of the quoted argument. The main lines of Cicero’s criticism of the Stoic argument are next commented upon, with emphasis on his implied view as to the requirements of a good argument. Towards the end of the paper, a few considerations are added on the changes in the prevailing style of argumentation conspicuous in the three famous Roman Stoics.

Sistema e subjetividade: o si estóico dos modernos

Esse artigo investiga a leitura que Shaftesbury fez de Marco Aurélio, a fim de comparar a visão estóica da individualidade e da identidade pessoal com o conceito lockiano de “self” e, de maneira mais geral, com os modos pelos quais a filosofia moderna entendeu o si-mesmo. A ênfase recai sobre a conexão intrínseca entre sistema e subjetividade no estoicismo imperial. Discute-se a resistência de autores contemporâneos em aceitar a descrição da alma racional dos estóicos como um “self”. Também se discute a aplicação que Michel Foucault fez do seu conceito de “subjetivação” à idéia estóica de “si-mesmo”.

The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and Affection (review)

The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and Affection (review)

Hans Urs von Balthasar and Some Contemporary Catholic Writers

This Article Has Two Parts. The first is-for lack of a better Word--theoretical and concentrates on Hans Urs von Balthasar and his work as it illuminates the intellectual heritage and confronts, or enters into dialogue with an increasingly secular heritage. The second part is an application of those insights to a work by each of three twentieth-century writers: the novelist Jon Hassler, the playwright Brian Friel, and the poet Denise Levertov. Two amazing things about the intellectual heritage: it is more than intellectual, and it is Catholic--with both the small and capital C. Catholic with a small c means universal. Catholicism is not only multinational but multiethnic and multidisciplinary. It is more than the biblical coat of many colors. It is more than a rainbow. Catholicism is the richness of life itself. As the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes asserts--alluding to the Roman playwright Terence--nothing that is genuinely human fails to find an echo in the hearts of the followers of Christ. (1) Because of the Incarnation, because God became a human being in the person of Jesus, all that belongs to human life was given profound, inestimable value. Catholicism and the doctrine of the Incarnation gave not only value to the world but an attitude toward it--no Platonic aloofness hankering for a world of forms, Roman stoicism, Norse or Teutonic fatalism toward the world. Though Catholicism has engaged and been transformed by all those forces-and many more besides-it continues to be a unique and dynamic living heritage. The portion of the intellectual heritage I shall consider in this article is the intellectual heritage of the West. Maligned by multiculturalists and postcolonialists (to name just a few of its critics), it is the heritage that many of us were born into and within which we live and breathe. It is a birthright, a treasure, a limitation, something of a scandal, and an obligation. Therefore, except for a brief glance or two, I must overlook the East and Africa and Catholicism in parts of the world. A brief aside on my emphasizing the Western tradition: When I think of western-European Catholicism, I often think of the Western priests in Shusaku Endo's novel, Silence, arriving in Japan. I also think of the Jesuit missionary in the film The Mission; actor Jeremy Irons climbing (what is really the Iguazu Falls in Argentina) to the Paraguayan plateau. In each work, the priests enter a new and other world, bringing only themselves, a book or two, and their faith. As western Catholics embodying this heritage, we also go forth--wherever we are sent--to meet and engage all cultures. But to engage all cultures, we must first be imbued with our own. In this article I hope to provide a perspective on that heritage that will help us better understand ourselves within that Western intellectual tradition of Catholicism. The doctrine of the Incarnation is what distinguishes the and Christian faiths from all religions of the world. It could be argued that of all the Christian religions, it is only Catholicism that takes the Incarnation with full seriousness. Whenever a religion is inclined to denigrate the body, earthly life, or fundamental human desires, it is in danger of moving away from the central fact of the Incarnation. God gave his only Son to become human and in that way ennobled--and in fact redeemed and thereby exalted--all of human and earthly life. In an apparent contradiction, the French poet and dramatist Paul Claudel is said to passionately desire the world, not as Christians, but only as pagans before him did. And still Claudel is passionate for the world because he is a Christian. (2) The passage continues: No earthly value can be disdained out of arrogance or resentment, every good is necessary to the Catholic; [the Catholic--WE--] cannot permit ... the smallest no . …

Paul and Roman Stoicism: Romans 12 and Contemporary Stoic Ethics

Exemplifying a rather widespread attitude among Pauline scholars, it has recently been argued on the basis of Rom. 12 that Paul differed sharply from the Stoics in his moral teaching. The present article aims to show that such a claim does not hold if and when the sources of Roman Stoicism are taken into consideration. A comparison of Paul’s moral teaching in Rom. 12 and contemporary Stoic ethics reveals that, whereas the two differ somewhat in scope (particular vs. universal), the differences are clearly outweighed by the many, striking similarities.

The secret history of emotion: from Aristotle's Rhetoric to modern brain science

Princess Diana's death was a tragedy that provoked mourning across the globe; the death of a homeless person, more often than not, is met with apathy. How can we account for this uneven distribution of emotion? Can it simply be explained by the prevailing scientific understanding? Uncovering a rich tradition beginning with Aristotle, Daniel M. Gross' Secret History of Emotion offers a counterpoint to the way we generally understand emotions today. Through a radical rereading of Aristotle, Seneca, Thomas Hobbes, Sarah Fielding, and Judith Butler, among others, Gross reveals a persistent intellectual current that considers emotions as psychosocial phenomena. The Roman Stoics, for instance, offer insight into the reasons political passions are distributed to some people but not to others. Contemporary theorists like Judith Butler, meanwhile, explain to us how psyches are shaped by power. To supplement his argument, Gross also provides a history and critique of the dominant modern view of emotions, expressed in Darwinism and neurobiology, in which they are considered organic, personal feelings independent of social circumstances. The result is a convincing work that rescues the study of the passions from science and returns it to the humanities and the art of rhetoric.