This volume offers a much needed shift of focus in the study of emotion in the history of philosophy. Discussion has tended to focus on the moral relevance of emotions, and (except in ancient philosophy) the role of emotions in cognitive life has received little attention. Thirteen new essays investigate the continuities between medieval and early modern thinking about the emotions, and open up a contemporary debate on the relationship between emotions, cognition, and reason, and the way emotions figure in our own cognitive lives. A team of leading philosophers of the medieval, renaissance, and early modern periods explore these ideas from the point of view of four key themes: the situation of emotions within the human mind; the intentionality of emotions and their role in cognition; emotions and action; the role of emotion in self-understanding and the social situation of individuals.

This volume explores emotion in medieval and early modern thought, and opens a contemporary debate on the way emotions figure in our cognitive lives. Thirteen original essays explore the key themes of emotion within the mind; the intentionality of emotions; emotions and action; and the role of emotion in self-understanding and social situations.

The first part of the book covers the theories of the emotions of Plato and Aristotle and later ancient views from Stoicism to Neoplatonism (Ch. 1) and their reception and transformation by early Christian thinkers from Clement and Origen to Gregory of Nyssa, Cassian and Augustine (Ch. 2). The basic ancient alternatives were the compositional theories of Plato and Aristotle and their followers and the Stoic judgement theory. These were associated with different conceptions of philosophical therapy. Ancient theories were employed in early Christian discussions of sin, Christian love, mystical union, and other forms of spiritual experience. The most influential theological themes were the monastic idea of supernaturally caused feelings and Augustine's analysis of the relations between the emotions and the will. The first part of Ch. 3 deals with the twelfth-century reception of ancient themes through monastic, theological, medical, and philosophical literature. The subject of the second part is the theory of emotions in Avicenna's faculty psychology, which, to a great extent, dominated the philosophical discussion of emotions in early thirteenth century. This approach was combined with Aristotelian ideas in later thirteenth century, particularly in Thomas Aquinas' extensive taxonomical theory. The increasing interest in psychological voluntarism led many Franciscan authors to abandon the traditional view that emotions belong only to the lower psychosomatic level. John Duns Scotus, William Ockham and their followers argued that there are also emotions of the will. Chapter 4 is about these new issues introduced in early fourteenth-century discussions, with some remarks on their influence on early modern thought.

This book is a collection of studies on topics related to subjectivity and selfhood in medieval and early modern philosophy. The individual contributions approach the theme from a number of angles varying from cognitive and moral psychology to metaphysics and epistemology. Instead of a complete overview on the historical period, the book provides detailed glimpses into some of the most important figures of the period, such as Augustine, Avicenna, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Hume. The questions addressed include the ethical problems of the location of one's true self and the proper distribution of labour between desire, passion and reason, and the psychological tasks of accounting for subjective experience and self-knowledge and determining different types of self-awareness.

The thoroughly contemporary question of the relationship between emotion and reason was debated with such complexity by the philosophers of the 17th century that their concepts remain a source of inspiration for today’s research about the emotionality of the mind. The analyses of the works of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and many other thinkers collected in this volume offer new insights into the diversity and significance of philosophical reflections about emotions during the early modern era. A focus is placed on affective components in learning processes and the boundaries between emotions and reason.

What are emotions? How do they arise? How do they relate to other mental and bodily states? And what is their specific structure? The book discusses these questions, focusing on medieval and early modern theories. It looks at a great number of authors, ranging from Aquinas to Spinoza, and shows that they gave sophisticated accounts of human emotions. They were particularly interested in the way we cope with our emotions: how we can change or perhaps even overcome them? To answer this question, medieval and early modern philosophers looked at the cognitive content of emotions, for they were all convinced that we need to work on that content if we want to change them. The book therefore pays particular attention to the intimate relationship between theories of emotions and theories of cognition. Moreover, the book emphasizes the importance of the metaphysical framework for medieval and early modern theories of emotions. It was a transformation of this framework that made new theories possible. Starting with an analysis of the Aristotelian framework, the book then looks at skeptical, dualist and monist frameworks, and it examines how the nature of emotions was explained in each of them. The discussion also takes the theological and scientific context into account, for changes in this context quite often gave rise to new problems - problems that concerned the love of God, the joy of resurrected souls, or the fear arising in a soul that is present in a body. All of these problems are examined on the basis of close textual analysis.

The heart is an iconic symbol in the medieval and early modern European world. In addition to being a physical organ, it is a key conceptual device related to emotions, cognition, the self and identity, and the body. The heart is read as a metaphor for human desire and will, and situated in opposition to or alongside reason and cognition. In medieval and early modern Europe, the “feeling heart” – the heart as the site of emotion and emotional practices – informed a broad range of art, literature, music, heraldry, medical texts, and devotional and ritual practices. This multidisciplinary collection brings together art historians, literary scholars, historians, theologians, and musicologists to highlight the range of meanings attached to the symbol of the heart, the relationship between physical and metaphorical representations of the heart, and the uses of the heart in the production of identities and communities in medieval and early modern Europe.