Philosophy and the Passions: Toward a History of Human Nature

Michel Meyer

Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000 - Philosophy - 295 pages

The subject of the passions has always haunted Western philosophy and, more often than not, aroused harsh judgments. For the passions represent a force of excess and lawlessness in humanity that produces troubling, confusing paradoxes.In this book, noted European philosopher Michel Meyer offers a wide-ranging exegesis, the first of its kind, that systematically retraces the history of philosophic conceptions of the passions in the work of such thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, and Freud. The great ruptures that led to passion's condemnation as sin, and to its romantic exultation as the truth of existence, are meticulously registered and the logic governing them astutely explicated.Meyer thus provides new insight into an age-old dilemma: Does passion torture people because it blinds them, or, on the contrary, does it permit them to apprehend who and what we really are?

About the author

Michel Meyer is Professor of Philosophy at the Free University of Brussels and the University of Mons. He is the author of many books, including From Logic to Rhetoric, From Metaphysics to Rhetoric, Meaning and Reading, Of Problematology, Questions and Questioning, and Rhetoric, Language, and Reason (1994, also published by Penn State Press). Robert F. Barsky is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of Constructing a Productive Other: Discourse Theory and the Convention Refugee Hearings, Introduction á la théorie littéraire, and Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Philosophy and the Passions: Toward a History of Human Nature; G - Reference,Information and Interdisciplinary Subjects Series; Literature and philosophy
• Author: Michel Meyer
• Editor: Robert F. Barsky
• Translated by: Robert F. Barsky
• Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000
• ISBN: 0271020326, 9780271020327
• Length: 295 pages
• Subjects: Philosophy / Criticism; Philosophy / General; Philosophy / History & Surveys / Ancient & Classical; Philosophy / History & Surveys / General; Philosophy / History & Surveys / Modern; Philosophy / Movements / Rationalism