Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilL’Atelier du CRH16Penser les émotions en Occident :...On the History of the Tables in T...

Penser les émotions en Occident : de l'Antiquité à nos jours

On the History of the Tables in Taxonomy of Emotions

Simo Knuuttila

Résumés

Les manuels et les écrits savants des xvie-xviie siècles font un usage croissant des possibilités typographiques pour éditer des diagrammes et des tables de classification. Ces instruments sont alors appliqués aux passions, ce qui se comprend dans la mesure où la première table analytique, reposant sur un schéma à quatre entrées, fut introduite dans la théorie stoïcienne puis discutée sans interruption jusqu’au début de l’époque moderne. J’étudie certains aspects de l’histoire de ce modèle à quatre entrées dans la théorie stoïcienne et ses transformations dans d’autres théories des émotions, en prenant quelques exemples de leurs formulations graphiques dans les travaux imprimés. Dans la seconde partie de l’article, j’étudie l’usage que fait Christian Thomasius d’une grille d’analyse destinée à l’évaluation psychologique des émotions et et de la personnalité. Thomasius, dans ses tables d’émotions, mêle caractéristiques physiques, psychologiques et sociologiques et les utilise de façon innovante pour définir des profils émotionnels fondés sur des valeurs quantifiées de l’intensité des traits de personnalité.

Haut de page

Texte intégral

  • 1 Jodocus Trutfetter, Summule totius logice, Erfurt, 1501; Bartholomaeus Usingen, Parvulus loyce cum (...)
  • 2 Johann Alsted, Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta, Hernborn, 1630.
  • 3 W. risse, Die Logik der Neuzeit, 1. Band 1500-1640, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, Friedrich Frommann Ver (...)
  • 4 See I. MacLean, “Logical Division and Visual Dichotomies: Ramus in the Context of Renaissance Legal (...)

1One striking feature of sixteenth- and seventeenth century textbooks and scholarly works was the use of typographic possibilities for printing tables the scope of which extended from the discussion of special cases to the organization of whole works. Displaying various distinctions by bracketing structures was particularly popular in elementary teaching material that aimed at clarity and brevity, such as early sixteenth-century logic books by Usingen and Trutfetter or the numerous late sixteenth- and early seventeenth century Ramist textbooks employing nested bifurcating tables.1 Alsted’s famous Encyclopaedia (1630) began with thirty-eight tables outlining the whole work.2 Some printed tables were already used in medieval manuscripts such as the Porphyry’s tree or Aristotle’s square of opposition in logic, as well as the late medieval geometrical analysis of the increase and decrease of velocity and other physical phenomena in terms of graphs with two axes, as in Nicholas Oresme’s mid-fourteenth century Tractatus de latitudinibus formarum, first published in 1482. Many occultist writers such as Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno, and Athanasius Kircher were interested in the combinatorial ideas of the Ars magna of Raymond Lull (1235-1316), particularly the model of revolving discs which yield all different combinations of the concepts on them. The Lullist diagrams had some influence on Leibniz’s early combinatorics.3 While early printed tables and diagrams were for the most part typographic tools for learning and mastering contents, they sometimes served for the synoptic comparison between various items and the conceptual analysis of functional connections.4 In the first part of my paper, I would like to shed light on the long history of the fourfold table in the discussion of emotions. In the second part, I will focus on Christian Thomasius’s application of a column analysis to psychological rating of emotions and personality assessment. None of these are simply lists of things. While the former models are associated with cross classifying theoretical constituents, Thomasius uses tables as a tool in estimating the numerical values of the intensity of character traits.

Fourfold Table in Ancient and Medieval Theories of Emotions

2The fourfold table analysis, which was often used in last century sociological research for various purposes, has an ancient predecessor first formulated by the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus for dealing with emotions. Because of the immense popularity of his simple taxonomy among later Stoic and non-Stoic thinkers, it is probably the most employed fourfold table in the history of philosophy. The Stoics divided emotions into four main types: pleasure (hēdonē) and distress (lypē), which relate to the present, and desire (epithumia) and fear (phobos), which relate to the future. Pleasure and desire were directed to something thought to be good and distress and fear to bad things. By cross tabling the value factor and time factor the emotions can be arranged as follows:

Time

Present

Anticipated

Value

Good

pleasure

(elation)

desire (reaching out)

Evil

distress (contraction)

fear (leaning away)

This is how the Stoic definition of passions is summarized in Pseudo-Andronicus’s Peri pathōn:

  • 5 Pseudo-Andronicus of Rhodes, Peri pathōn, ed. A. Glibert-Thirry, Corpus Latinus, Commentariorum in (...)

Distress is an irrational contraction, or a fresh opinion that something evil is present, at which it is considered right to be contracted. Fear is an irrational avoidance, or escape from an expected danger. Desire is an irrational reaching out, or pursuit of an expected good. Pleasure is an irrational elation, or a fresh opinion that something good is present, at which it is considered right to be elated.5

  • 6 The above figure is modified from the formulation in T. Brennan, “The Old Stoic Theory of Emotions” (...)

3It is possible that the idea of cross classifying the constitutive aspects of emotions was presented as a figure in ancient sources, but such tables are not preserved.6

  • 7 Pseudo-Andronicus, Peri pathōn, 1.1-5; see also Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum, ed. M. Marc (...)
  • 8 For the Stoic theory of emotions in general, see T. Brennan, The Stoic Life: Emotions, Duties, and (...)

Abandoning the assumption of a separate emotional power of the soul, which included the concupiscible and the irascible in Plato and Aristotle and their followers, the Stoics argued that all human actions can be explained in terms of the operational principles of one rational soul. In agreement with this general attitude they regarded emotions as hormetic (action initiating) value judgements. The Stoics divided emotions into the above four basic types under which a great number of various specific emotions were classified.7 The fully developed definitions of emotion types involve a description of an affective psychosomatic movement (contraction, elation, reaching out, leaning away), a value-judgement about an object, as well as a practical judgement that it is proper to react to the object with affective movements and behavioural reactions. According to the Stoics, the universe is guided by divine reason in which all human beings in principle participate. The majority of people, alienated from their real nature, do not understand this. They evaluate things from their subjective self-regarding perspective. These evaluative propositions are emotions that the Stoics famously labelled as wrong judgements. Stoic cognitive therapy aimed at freedom from emotions (apatheia).8

4Augustine who disagreed with the Stoics on the value of emotions made use of their classificatory model in explaining the basic types of emotions as forms of love in De civitate Dei XIV.7:

  • 9 Augustine, De civitate Dei, ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 47-48, T (...)

Love, then, striving to have what is loved, is desire, and having and enjoying it, is joy; and love fleeting what is opposed to it, is fear, and experiencing this when it happens, is distress. Now, these are bad if the love is evil and good if it good.”9

  • 10 Boethius, Philosophiae consolatio, ed. L. Bieler, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 94, Turnhout, (...)

This was later a well-known application of the Stoic model, as was Boethius’s concise summary of the basic emotions in Consolatio philosophiae I.7, 25-28.10

5Another fourfold analysis applied to the emotions can be found in Alī ibn al-‘Abbās al-Mağūsī (Haly Abbas) medical encyclopaedia, partially translated into Latin by Constantine the African under the title Pantegni in late eleventh century. It was used in medical studies until the sixteenth century. The Pantegni lists a number of emotions or, as they were called, accidents of the soul, which were regarded as relevant in medicine. Two emotions (joy and anger) are associated with the motion of the Galenic natural spirit (natural heat) from the heart to the extreme parts and two others (distress and fear) with the motion toward the heart. In a later translation by Stephen of Antioch these motions are further divided into slow (distress, joy) and quick (anger). On the basis of the direction and intensity of the motions the four basic emotions can be presented as follows:

Direction

inward

outward

Intensity

Slow

joy

distress

Quick

anger

fear

  • 11 Haly Abbas, Liber totius medicine necessaria continens, Lyon, 1523, 69a-b. For the diagram, see P. (...)

Anger is rushing out of the blood from the heart and a quick movement of natural heat at the same time throughout the body, preparing one for revenging insults […] Joy is a movement of natural heat into the extremes of the body and its slow diffusion […] Distress is a slow movement of the natural heat into the inner part of the body […] Fear is a movement of natural heat into the inner part of the body. (Haly Abbas, Liber totius medicine necessaria continens, trans. Stephen of Antioch, V.38)11

6In Maino de Maineri’s fourteenth-century Regimen sanitatis (III.8) one can find the classification as in the table above:

  • 12 Maino de Maineri, Regimen sanitatis, Paris, 1506.

In anger the heat and the spirit quickly and impetuously move out and they do not wholly leave this radix; they first move into it and then out. In joy the natural heat and the spirit slowly move out, and sometimes the radix, that is, the heart, is left without them […] In fear, the heat and the spirit quickly move in, and in distress they move slowly.12

  • 13 Iohannes Fernelius, Universa Medicina, Lyon, 1578, I.18.
  • 14 Johann Jacob Wecker, Medicinae utriusque syntaxes, Basel, 1601. See also Jodocus Trutfetter, Summa (...)

7This was an oft-quoted model in Renaissance medical works such as Jean Fernel’s Universa medicina.13 In Johann Jacob Wecker’s Medicinae utriusque syntaxes it is printed as follows:14

Twelfth-century Latin Models with an Augustinian Background

  • 15 See S. knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2006, p. 21 (...)

8Affective evaluation, motivation, and physiological changes were traditionally regarded as recognizable aspects of emotions. These were also involved in Avicenna’s theory of the sensory motive acts of the concupiscible and irascible faculties. Avicenna made some remarks about the feeling aspect as well, classifying pleasure and joy as acts of apprehensive power, pleasant modes of apprehending things. Somewhat strangely, he classified pain and distress, the contraries of pleasure and joy, as irascible acts. He apparently thought that, as distinct from pleasure and joy, pain and distress could be also treated as motive acts. It remains less clear whether all motive acts are associated with a feeling. Avicenna thinks that, since the structure of emotions consists of acts of separate faculties, a unified awareness of the soul is required for them to form a whole.15

9In the twelfth century, some Latin authors also put forward taxonomies in which distress and fear were regarded as irascible emotions, but this approach deviated from Avicenna in classifying joy and hope as the emotion types of the concupiscible power as follows:

Time

Present

Anticipated

Faculty

Concupiscible (about what is loved)

joy

hope

Irascible (about what is contrary to what is loved)

distress

fear

  • 16 Isaac of Stella, Epistola de anima, Patrologia Latina 194, ed. J.- P. Migne, 1875-1890.

10Affect is fourfold: as for things which we love, we either enjoy them as present or hope for them as future, while with respect to things which we hate we already have distress about them or else are in fear of having it. And so joy and hope arise from the concupiscible power, while distress and fear arise from the irascible power. (Isaac of Stella, Letter on the Soul, 1878d)16

  • 17 Anonymous, Liber de spiritu et anima, Patrologia Latina, ed. J.- P. Migne, 40, 782. For various fur (...)
  • 18 See Knuuttila 2006, p. 230.
  • 19 “The motive powers are divided into appetitive and aggressive ones. While the appetitive power seek (...)

11The same model is used in an anonymous (Alcher of Clairvaux?) late twelfth-century treatise De spiritu et anima, which until Aquinas was often mistakenly attributed to Augustine.17 The background of this model is Augustine’s application of the Stoic fourfold table which is now associated with the distinction between concupiscible and irascible faculties. These authors apparently thought that concupiscible emotions are reactions to good things and the irascible emotions to evil things. When Aristotle’s psychology became better known in early thirteenth century, it was realized that this division is in disagreement with his treatment of concupiscible and irascible powers as having both positive and negative emotions.18 This led to a new division in the 1220s: there are contrary concupisciple reactions to sensory good or evil things, and contrary irascible emotions as reactions to great and arduous things. The idea of arduousness of the objects as the dividing principle between two emotional powers continued to be generally used in thirteenth-century theories.19 It was also the basic dividing principle in Aquinas’s taxonomy, which became the most used classification until the seventeenth century.

12In his De veritate, Aquinas comments on the above division in De spiritu et anima as follows:

  • 20 Quaestiones disputatate I. De veritate, ed. R. Spiazzi, Turin, Marietti,1964.

Because this book is not by Augustine, there is no need to treat is as an authority and particularly not here where it is clearly mistaken. Hope does not belong to the concupiscible power but it belongs to the irascible power, and distress not to the irascible power but to the concupiscible power (26.5, ad 7).20

13Aquinas’s corrections yield a new arrangement of the twelfth-century model as follows:

Time

Present

Anticipated

Faculty

Concupiscible

joy

distress

love, desire

hatred, avoidance

Irascible

anger

hope - despair

fear - courage

  • 21 De veritate 26.5; Summa theologiae, ed. P. Caramello, Turin, Marietti, 1948-1950; II-1, 25.4.
  • 22 Summa theologiae II-1.23.2.
  • 23 Hugh of st. Victor, De substantia dilectionis, ed.  R. Baron, in Six opuscules spirituels, Sources (...)
  • 24 John of La Rochelle, Summa de anima, ed. G. Bougerol, Textes philosophiques du Moyen Âge, 19, Paris (...)

14The emotions under discussion are those printed in bold. Other titles of Aquinas’s own taxonomy are added to the same schema. Aquinas says that the Stoic model represents the principal emotions, which are independent of others, two about present good and evil things and two about arduous future good or evil things.21 His own idea is that the doctrine of contrary movements and changes, found in Aristotle’s Physics, can be applied to principal and dependent emotions as movements of the soul. The contrary movements of the concupiscible power are directed towards contrary ends (sense-good and sense-evil), and the contrary movements of the irascible power with respect to arduous objects are approaches toward and withdrawals from the same object. Anger is without any positive counterpart.22 The sequence of positive concupiscible emotions (love, desire-joy) is based on the popular twelfth-century analysis by Hugh of St. Victor, who defined love as a pleasant awareness of an object which, when striving for the object, is called desire, and when enjoying it, is called joy.23 The concupiscible sequence of emotions toward evil things (hate-avoidance-distress) is formed analogously. While Aquinas apparently was first to apply the physical theory of contrary movements to emotions, his taxonomy as such was a simplified version of the more detailed classification in John of La Rochelle’s Summa de anima.24

  • 25 Tractatus quinque ad Primam Secundae, tract. IV, 1.12.5-6, in Opera omnia IV, Paris, Vivès, 1856, 4 (...)
  • 26 Scientiarum omnium Encyclopaedia, tomus III, Lyon, 1649, 25.

15Aquinas’s taxonomy of emotions remained popular until the seventeenth century. Francisco Súarez admitted that emotions could be conceptualized in other way as well, but he preferred Aquinas’s division of eleven emotions because it was “more commonly used than others and provides an easier explanation of the origin and connection among all emotions”.25 Those who criticized the Thomist taxonomy, such as Gabriel Biel, often preferred the Stoic division, which, to be sure, Aquinas himself regarded as the basic one. Aquinas’s taxonomy could be easily displayed by using nested brackets in the way Alsted did in his Encyclopaedia:26

  • 27 Summa in totam physicen Dd3v; Trutfetter’s formulation is somewhat simplified in the above quotatio (...)

16Some early modern writers who preferred the Stoic taxonomy combined it with the division between concupiscible and irascible emotions in the same way as Isaac of Stella and others. It was thought that there is one emotional faculty of the soul which functions in a concupiscible or irascible way. Trutfetter describes this with a diagram:27

Psychological and Sociological Tables in Christian Thomasius’s Treatise on the Passions

  • 28 Von der Artzeney Wider die unvernünfftige Liebe und der zuvorher nöthigen Erkäntnüss Sein Selbst. O (...)
  • 29 See Schneiders 1999, p. xi.

17Jakob Thomasius, the teacher of Leibniz at the University of Leipzig, was the father of Christian Thomasius (1655-1728) who became a lecturer of natural law at the same university and later a professor of law at the University of Halle. When still in Leipzig, he decided to write introductory works on theoretical and practical philosophy in German language. After two books on epistemology and reasoning, he published an introduction to ethics and a practical continuation volume under the title On the Medicine against Irrational Love and the Necessary Prior Knowledge of Self. Or: Execution of the Moral Doctrine (1696).28 This work was republished seven times, translated into Latin in 1706, and often quoted by German philosophers until the end of the eighteenth century.29

  • 30 R. Sorabji, Emotion and the Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, Oxford, Ox (...)
  • 31 J. Kraye, “Apatheia and Propatheiai in Early Modern Discussions of the Passions: Stoicism, Christia (...)

18The title of Thomasius’s book could have derived from post-classical ancient guides for improving one’s life through better self-knowledge and the therapy of emotions, whether the Stoic therapy which aimed at the extirpation of emotions (apatheia) or the alternative therapy of the Platonists or Epicureans which aimed at moderated emotions (metriopatheia). These philosophers assumed that people were not as happy as they wanted to be and the main reason for this was that their minds were not peaceful but full of changing and contending emotions leading away from a good life, even when the other requirements of happiness were fulfilled.30 In early modern times, there was an increasing trend of philosophical therapy, whether in applications of Hellenistic models in Neo-Stoicism or Neo-Epicureanism or combinations of traditional ideas with the new mechanist models of psychology.31

19Thomasius begins with the ancient question of why human beings have no peace of mind, arguing that this is because they are guided by evil emotions. After this opening, the book includes a long part (chapters 2 and 3) that describes the theories and classifications of emotions of the Stoics, Aristotelians (Aquinas), neo-Epicureans (Gassendi), and Descartes, as well as a critical evaluation of these approaches and a suggestion of how the affections of the soul should be analysed.

  • 32 On the Medicine, p. 74-79.

20Thomasius’s psychology of action is built on two powers that he calls the understanding and the will. The understanding is the power of being aware of things through sensory representations and by forming concepts and judgements. The will is the power by which the mind may initiate actions. Sensory impressions on the mind are called the passions of understanding; thinking is an activity of understanding. There are also passions and actions of the will – its passions are its caused states or movements and its actions are choices and decisions. The proper affects, that is, the passions of the will, are also called inclinations of the mind, Gemüthsneigungen.32

  • 33 On the Medicine, p. 79-81, 84-86, 92-105, 514-517.
  • 34 On the Medicine, p. 88-90, 109.
  • 35 On the Medicine, p. 94-96.

21In elaborating this general picture, Thomasius follows Cartesian ideas of the mechanist functioning of vital spirits and neural movements. The physiological side of the passions consists of changes of the heart and movements of the vital spirit, which in their turn are caused by neural movements in sensory organs and the brain or are associated with imagination or thinking in the brain. There are similar mechanics in the animals but, properly speaking, no affects because animals have no will and reason which in Thomasius’s view demand self-consciousness. Certain representations move the spirits in animals through physical mechanisms and make them behave in a way that is adequate for them. Similarly the elementary passions of the human mind are externally caused. Human beings are aware of themselves as the subjects of such inclining changes that Thomasius regards as the passive movements of the will. While these initial stages of the will are not free, they can be later controlled by free volitions.33 The link between the causal physiological mechanism and intentional awareness remains somewhat obscure, but Thomasius takes for granted that occurrent affects are usually directed to things that are represented as intentional objects.34 He is also interested in cases when one is aware of the affects of the will without knowing their causes. He discussed occult causal influences such that people may suffer when there is a cat in a room even when they are not aware of it.35

  • 36 On the Medicine, p. 77-81.
  • 37 S. Knuuttila, “Sixteenth-Century Discussions of the Passions of the Will”, in M. Pickavé and L. Sha (...)

22While Thomasius’s psychosomatic picture of the passions follows the Cartesian view, he deviates from the Cartesians in his approach to the concepts of understanding and will. He argues that the Cartesians are misled by their assumption that the acts of the will are always actions, as distinct from the passions. For Thomasius, affects are typically first passions which then may develop to free acts of the will.36 John Duns Scotus brought this view into discussion. In his time there was a long tradition of treating emotions as movements of the psychosomatic sensory soul and separating them from the will, which is a faculty of the non-material intellectual part of the soul. Scotus changed this picture by introducing the concept of the passions of the will, that is, pleasure and distress of the intellectual soul. This was a well-known theory among the authors of the second scholasticism. Scotus regarded the intellectual soul (including the will) as emotionally sensitive – it may react with a pleasant or unpleasant feeling to almost anything that takes place in the soul or body.37

  • 38 Thomas Aquinas refers to this in commenting on Augustine’s remark in De civitate Dei that various p (...)

23The notion of passions of the will was thus not new as such, but it was used in Thomasius’s psychology without any sharp distinction between the levels of the soul and, more importantly, while the passions of the will were the feelings of pleasure or distress in Scotus, these feelings were not proper affects in Thomasius. In his usage, proper affects refer to volitions about future things. (See the next paragraph.) Thomasius’s use of the notion of will shows some similarity to Augustine who had a wide use of the term will, which referred to all motive acts of the souls of human beings and animals, and a narrow use of the will as the highest controlling faculty which is free.38

  • 39 On the Medicine, p. 83, 88-89, 113-114, 117-118.

24Thomasius particularly stresses that the main mistake of the Cartesian theory is to regard wonder as a principal affect. It is not an affect of the will and consequently not a passion in the proper sense. Similarly he remarks that while traditional theories regard pleasure and distress as passions, these are not passions of the will, because they are not action initiators. They are feelings of understanding, Empfindungen, rather than of the will – they may accompany the passions of the will and motivate these, but they themselves are not affects of the will.39 The affects or the passions of the will are essentially future-directed behavioural suggestions that tend to move the subject.

  • 40 For synoptic tables for virtues and other issues of practical philosophy, see Jacob Thomasius, Phil (...)
  • 41 On the Medicine, p. 158-170. The third row (Wealth etc.) indicates the motivational basis of the th (...)

25In chapters 4 and 5 Thomasius comments on various taxonomies and presents that of his own in which love and hate are the basic emotions. After having argued that emotions are morally indifferent in themselves, but good or evil in the service of reasonable or unreasonable love (chapter 6), he is particularly interested in classifying people in various groups depending on which emotion-type is dominant in them (chapter 7). He distinguishes between four groups, which are led by various basic inclinations which determine their behaviour – these are called reasonable love, pleasure seeking sensuality, ambition, and acquisitiveness. This typology is taken to be supported by natural philosophy, political theory, medical theory etc., as is shown by a table on p. 170-171 of Thomasius treatise (quoted below).40 The division has also a sociological aspect. It is thought that certain groups in society particularly represent certain attitudes. Reasonable love is a good virtuous attitude associated with philanthropy and moderation. Other basic attitudes produce evil emotions and destroy the peace of mind. The cognitive aspect of the theory is seen in the assumption that evil emotions are based on a misguided worldview – in pleasure seeking a person does not understand his or her role in the world as a rational being, the ambition treats other people merely from a competitive perspective and raises one’s self-esteem too much, and the avarice, the worst of all, counts the value of everything from the economic point of view.41

Reasonable love (Vernünfftige Liebe)

Sensuality (Wolluſt)

Ambition (Ehrgeitz)

Acquisitiveness (Geldgeitz)

Peaceful people

(Ruhige Menschen)

Suppressing human nature

(Die Menschliche Natur
unterdrückende)

Raising human nature too much

(Die menschliche Natur allzusehr erhebende)

Other creatures under humans

(Andre Creaturen unter
den Menschen)

Wealth

(Reichthum)

Noblesse/non-Noblesse

(Adel/Un-Adel)

Poverty

(Armuth)

Mercury (Qvecksilber)

Sulphur (Schweffel)

Salt (Saltz)

Lufft (Air)

Water (Wasser)

Fire (Feuer)

Eearth (Erde)

Phlegma

Bloood (Sangvis)

Choler (Cholera)

Melancholy (Melancholia)

Hypogastrium

(Venter infimus)

Brain (Cerebrum)

Heart (Cor)

Justice (Justitia)

Temperance (Temperantia)

Prudence (Prudentia)

Fortitude (Fortitudo)

Youth

(Jugend)

Adult age

(Männlich Alter)

Old age

(Hohes Alter)

Oeconomical estate

(Nehrstand)

Political estate

(Wehrstand)

Learned estate

(Lehrstand)

Students

(Studenten)

Practical philosophers

(Philosophi practici)

Theoretical philosophers

(Philosophi theoretici)

Medical doctors (Medici)

Jurists (JCti)

Theologians (Theologi)

Prin-

ci-

pes

Citicens

(Bürger)

Noblemen

(Edelleute)

Farmers

(Bauren)

Craft people

(Handwercksleute)

Scholarly people (Gelehrte)

Merchants

(Kauffleute)

Sol-

da-

ten

26The improvement of the passions should begin from a correct view of one’s present condition. For this end people should improve their consciousness about their practical habits with the help of the second table (p. 172-173 quoted below) in which the typical attitudes of the four main types are compared. Considering the alternatives is meant to be an exercise in self-knowledge. People may realize that on the basis of their strongest inclinations they should locate themselves in different columns on different lines. Thomasius assumes that they typically represent mixtures of the basic types and they can become aware of their moral profile by realizing how much they have of the features of each type. Virtues and vices of men are listed with respect to the behaviour in various moral contexts such as 1. conversation, 2. giving, 3. social intercourse, 4. meeting dangers, 5. attitude to women, 6. attitude to money, 7. work, 8. aggression, 9. helping. The last row is about the characteristic features of thinking.

Reasonable love

Sensuality

Ambition

Acquisitiveness

1. Discreet candour (Verschwiegene

Offenhertzigkeit)

Thoughtless chat

(Unbedachtsame Klätzscherey)

Hard stubbornness

(Hartnäckigte

Stöckischeit)

Wicked lying and simulation

(Tückische Lügen und Simulirung)

2. Liberality

(Gutthätige Freygebigkeit)

Dissolute waste

(Liederliche Verschwendung)

Vain waste

(Eitele Verschwendung)

Relentless greed and parsimony (Unbarmh. Filzigkeit und Knickerey)

3. Impartial friendliness

(Gleichmüthige Freundligkeit)

Servile Submission (Knechtische

Submission)

Pride

(Verächtlicher Hochmuth)

Foolish conceit, parasitism (Närrische Auffgeblasenheit Schmarotzerey)

4. Patient heartiness

(Gedultige Hertz-

hafftigkeit)

Impatient cowardness

(Ungedultige Zaghafftigkeit)

Harsh boldness

(Grimmige Toll-Kühnheit)

Cruel malignity

(Hämische Grausamkeit)

5. Sober moderate chastity (Nüchterne mässige Keuschheit)

Boozy and gluttonous lechery

(Versoffene frässige Geilheit)

Stoic continence and insensitivity

Stoische Faste und

Unempfindlichkeit

Intensive hate of the female sex (Schindhündisch. Hass des weibl. Geschlechts

6. Frugality

Sparsamkeit

Prodicality

Verschwendung

Strictness

Genauigkeit

Austerity

Lauserey

7. Busy briskness (Geschäfftige Munterkeit)

Lazy idleness

(Fauler Müssiggang)

Watchful industriousness (Wachsame Arbeitsamkeit)

Tedious donkey work (Mühsame Eselsarbeit)

8. Patient magnanimity (Gedultige Grossmuth)

Sudden-angry softness (Gähzornige Weichhertzig-keit)

Angry revenge

(Zornige Rachgier)

Tenacious hostility

(Verbeissende Nachtragung)

9. Joyful helpfulness

(Freudige

Dienstfertigkeit)

Services of matchmakers and actors

(Kupler- und Spielmanns-Dienste)

Services of bandits

(Banditendienste)

Envious Schadenfroh

(Neidischer Schadenfroh)

10. Proper memory, judiciousness, ingeniousness

(Gemässigt Gedächtnüs

Ingenium Judicium)

Inventive fabrication

(Ingenieuse Erfindung)

Judicious decision

(Judiciose Entscheidung)

Exceptional memory

(Ungemein Gedächtnüs)

27While Thomasius does not give detailed instructions of self-evaluation in Einübung der Sittenlehre, his idea seems to be that people should evaluate their inclinations with respect to the alternatives on each row and then summarize the intensity of these inclinations in each column. He believes that people usually have some amount of the reasonable love on each row, but not very much, the higher rates being located in other columns. This can be concluded from the model which he developed for determining a person’s psychological profile by using rating scales in which numerical values are given for the intensity of various character traits related to each of the four basic types and consequently for the dominance of the main types. After the assessment of various personality features, Thomasius gives the highest numerical value (60) to the most dominant aspect, the lowest to the weakest aspect (5), usually reasonable love, and rates the others between these. He gives examples of his evaluation and combination of character features of individuals such as:

  • Person A: Acquisitiveness (60)/ Sensuality (45-50)/Ambition (20-25)/Reasonable love (5)

  • Person B: Sensuality (60) /Acquisitiveness (55)/Ambition (20)/ Reasonable love (5).

  • 42 See On the Medicine, p. 363-367; Weitere Erleuterung durch unterschiedene Exempel des ohnlängst get (...)

28In addition he reports of an experiment in which he asked two students to evaluate a person he had analysed in this way in order to check the reliability of his method. He also offers an evaluation of the psychological profile of Cardinal Mazarin: ambition (60), sensuality (50), reasonable love (20-30), acquisitiveness (5-10).42

  • 43 On the Medicine, p. 361-363.

29Following “the art of combinatorics”, Thomasius organizes the possible personality types in six groups in which the basic elements are ordered on the basis of their dominance. Because of his pessimistic view of human nature, reasonable love is always the last in general models.43

I.

1. Ambition

2. Acquisitiveness

3. Sensuality

4. Reasonable love

II.

1. Acquisitiveness

2. Ambition

3. Sensuality

4. Reasonable love

III.

1. Sensuality

2. Acquisitiveness

3. Ambition

4. Reasonable love

IV.

1. Acquisitiveness

2. Sensuality

3. Ambition

4. Reasonable love

V.

1. Sensuality

2. Ambition

3. Acquisitiveness

4. Reasonable love

VI.

1. Ambition

2. Sensuality

3. Acquisitiveness

4. Reasonable love

30In discussing these mixtures in Chapter 12, Thomasius thinks that even though the reasonable love is weak in people, the general outlook of their behavior is not necessarily very bad because the tendencies to evil volitions described in different columns may mutually prevent each other from action. However, this does not have much to do with the peace of mind or make people subjectively happy. Thomasius finds the question of the mutual influence of the dominant affects interesting, but his remarks on it are sketchy.

  • 44 This is the basis of Thomasius’s criticism of the approaches to mastering emotions in Descartes and (...)
  • 45 Thomasius recommends to his readers the Traité de la paix de l'âme et du contentement de l'esprit b (...)
  • 46 For faith and philosophy in Thomasius, see T. Ahnert, “Enthusiasm and Enlightenment: Faith and Phil (...)

31When Thomasius begins to describe traditional philosophical therapy tools in Chapter 14, the chapter remains brief and he tells that, after all, he does not believe that philosophy can help much, except by explaining the various forms of non-reasonable love. His increasing pessimism is based on the view that the will is very little guided by right reason, as is explained in Chapter 15. People may understand the description of reasonable love and regard the basic view of human condition associated with it as right, but this does not change their action because their will is fixed to other things as well, which they do not give up.44 They may love the idea of general human friendship, but they love other things more. The ideal of reasonable love is not sufficiently attractive to change their will, which is fixed to other things because of the social pressure and the immediate attractiveness of evil things. The image of virtues is not competitive with respect to unreasonable tendencies which people are not able to change by their free will. In the last chapter Thomasius says that he believes that only faith is able to do this. Philosophy does not make operative the right values which the peace of mind demands.45 In his later life Thomasius shows somewhat more trust in philosophy.46

References

T. Ahnert, “Enthusiasm and Enlightenment: Faith and Philosophy in the Thought of Christian Thomasius”, Modern Intellectual History 2 (2005), p. 153-177.

L. Alanen, “Emotions in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century”, in S. Knuuttila and J. Sihvola (eds.), Sourcebook for the History of the Philosophy of Mind, Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind 12, Dordrecht, Springer, 2014, p. 499-533.

Alī ibn al-‘Abbās al-Mağūsī (Haly Abbas), Liber totius medicine necessaria continens, Lyon 1523.

Johann Alsted, Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta, Lyon, 1649.

Anonymous, De potentiis animae et obiectis, ed. D. A. Callus in “The Powers of the Soul: An Early Unpublished Text”, Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 19 (1952), p. 131-170.

Anonymous, Liber de spiritu et anima, Patrologia Latina, ed. J. -P. Migne, Patrologia Latina, 40, 779-832.

Augustine, De civitate Dei, ed. B. Dombart et A. Kalb, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 47-48, Turnhout, Brepols, 1955.

Bernard of Clairvaux, Opera 5, ed. J. Leclerq and H. M. Rochais, Rome, Editiones Cistercienses, 1968.

Boethius, Philosophiae consolatio, ed. L. Bieler, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 94, Turnhout, Brepols, 1957.

T. Brennan, “The Old Stoic Theory of Emotions”, in J. Sihvola and T. Engberg-Pedersen (eds.), The Emotions in Hellenistic Philosophy, The New Synthese Historical Library 46, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1998, p. 21-70.

T. Brennan, The Stoic Life: Emotions, Duties, and Fate, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2005.

Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes, ed. M. Pohlenz, Leipzig, Teubner, 1918.

Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum, edM. Marcovich, Leipzig, Teubner, 1999.

P. Gil-Sotres, “Modelo teórico y observación clínica: las pasiones del alma en la psicología medica medieval”, in Comprendre et maîtriser la nature au Moyen Âge. Mélanges d’histoire des sciences offerts à Guy Beaujouan, École pratique des Hautes Études, Sciences historiques et philologiques 5; Hautes études médiévales et modernes 73, Geneva, Droz, 1994, p. 181-204.

M. R. Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Ioannes Fernelius, Universa Medicina, Lyon, 1578.

Hugh of St. Victor, De substantia dilectionis, ed. R. Baron, in Six opuscules spirituels, Sources chrétiennes 155, Paris, Les Éditions du Cerf, 1969.

Isaac of Stella, Epistola de anima, Patrologia Latina, ed. J. -P. Migne, 194, 1875-1890.

John of La Rochelle, Summa de anima, ed. G. Bougerol, Textes philosophiques du moyen âge 19, Paris, Vrin, 1995.

S. Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2006.

S. Knuuttila, “Sixteenth-Century Discussions of the Passions of the Will”, in M. Pickavé and L. Shapiro (eds.), Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, New York, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 116-132.

J. KrayeApatheia and Propatheiai in Early Modern Discussions of the Passions: Stoicism, Christianity and Natural History”, Early Science and Medicine 17 (2012), p. 230-253.

Maino de Maineri, Regimen sanitatis, Paris, 1506.

I. MacLean, “Logical Division and Visual Dichotomies: Ramus in the Context of Renaissance Legal and Medical Writing”, in M. Feingold, J. Freedman, and W. Rother (eds.), The Influence of Petrus Ramus: Studies in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Philosophy and Sciences, Basel, Schwabe, 2001, p. 229-249.

I. MacLean, “Diagrams in the Defence of Galen: Medical Uses of Tables, Squares, Dichotomies, Wheels, and Latitudes, 1480-1574”, in S. Kusukawa and I. MacLean (eds.), Transmitting Knowledge: Words, Images, and Instruments in Early Modern Europe, Oxford-Warburg Studies, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 136-164.

P. McReynolds and K. Ludwig, “Christian Thomasius and the Origin of Psychological Rating Scales”, Isis 1984 (75), p. 546-553.

Pseudo-Andonicus of Rhodes, Peri pathōn, ed. A. Glibert-Thirry, Corpus Latinus, Commentariorum in Aristotelem Graecorum, suppl. 2, Leiden, Brill, 1977.

Petrus Ramus, P. Rami Professio regia hoc est septem artes liberales, ed. J. T. Freigius, Basel, 1576.

W. Risse, Die Logik der Neuzeit, 1. Band 1500-1640, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1964.

R. Sorabji, Emotion and the Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000.

Johann Stier, Praecepta Ethicae sive Philosophiae Moralis, Gotha 1646.

Stobaeus, Anthologium, ed. C. Wachsmuth and O. Hense, Berlin, Weidmannsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1958.

Francisco Suaréz, Opera omnia IV, Paris, Vivès, 1856.

Taddeus Alederotti, Expositiones in arduum Aphorismi Ipocratis, Venice 1527.

Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatate I. De veritate, ed. R. Spiazzi, Turin, Marietti, 1964.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, ed. P. Caramello, Turin, Marietti, 1948-1950.

Christian Thomasius, Von der Artzeney Wider die unvernünfftige Liebe und der zuvorher nöthigen Erkäntnüss Sein Selbst. Oder: Ausübung der Sitten Lehre, Halle, 1696; a reprint with a preface by W. Schneiders in Christian Thomasius, Ausgewählte Werke, Band 11, Hildesheim, Olms, 1999.

Christian Thomasius, Weitere Erleuterung durch unterschiedene Exempel des ohnlängst gethanen Vorschlags wegen der neuen Wissenschafft anderer Menschen Gemüther erkennen zu lernen, Halle, 1692.

Jacob Thomasius, Philosophia practica continuis tabellis comprehensa, editio secunda, Leipzig, 1667.

Jodocus Trutfetter, Summa in totam physicem, Erfurt, 1514.

Jodocus Trutfetter, Summule totius logice, Erfurt, 1501.

Bartholomaeus Usingen, Parvulus loyce cum figuris, Erfurt, 1501.

William of Saint Thierry, De natura corporis et animae, ed. and trans. M. Lemoine, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1988.

Haut de page

Notes

1 Jodocus Trutfetter, Summule totius logice, Erfurt, 1501; Bartholomaeus Usingen, Parvulus loyce cum figuris, Erfurt, 1501; P. Rami Professio regia hoc est septem artes liberales, ed. J. T. Freigius, Basel, 1576.

2 Johann Alsted, Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta, Hernborn, 1630.

3 W. risse, Die Logik der Neuzeit, 1. Band 1500-1640, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1964, p. 532-560.

4 See I. MacLean, “Logical Division and Visual Dichotomies: Ramus in the Context of Renaissance Legal and Medical Writing”, in M. Feingold, J. Freedman, and W. Rother (eds.), The Influence of Petrus Ramus: Studies in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Philosophy and Sciences, Basel, Schwabe, 2001, p. 229-249; id., “Diagrams in the Defence of Galen: Medical Uses of Tables, Squares, Dichotomies, Wheels, and Latitudes, 1480-1574”, in S. Kusukawa and I. Maclean (eds.), Transmitting Knowledge: Words, Images, and Instruments in Early Modern Europe, Oxford-Warburg Studies, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 136-164.

5 Pseudo-Andronicus of Rhodes, Peri pathōn, ed. A. Glibert-Thirry, Corpus Latinus, Commentariorum in Aristotelem Graecorum, suppl. 2, Leiden, Brill, 1977, 1.1. (p. 223.12-19).

6 The above figure is modified from the formulation in T. Brennan, “The Old Stoic Theory of Emotions”, in J. Sihvola and T. Engberg-Pedersen (eds.), The Emotions in Hellenistic Philosophy, The New Synthese Historical Library 46, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1998, p. 30.

7 Pseudo-Andronicus, Peri pathōn, 1.1-5; see also Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum, ed. M. Marcovich, Leipzig, Teubner, 1999, VII.110-14; Stobaeus, Anthologium, ed. C. Wachsmuth and O. Hense, Berlin, Weidmannsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1958, II.88.16-21; 90.7-92.17; Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes, ed. M. Pohlenz, Leipzig, Teubner, 1918, IV.11-22.

8 For the Stoic theory of emotions in general, see T. Brennan, The Stoic Life: Emotions, Duties, and Fate, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2005; M. R. Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2007.

9 Augustine, De civitate Dei, ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 47-48, Turnhout, Brepols, 1955.

10 Boethius, Philosophiae consolatio, ed. L. Bieler, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 94, Turnhout, Brepols, 1957.

11 Haly Abbas, Liber totius medicine necessaria continens, Lyon, 1523, 69a-b. For the diagram, see P. Gil-Sotres,  “Modelo teórico y observación clínica: las pasiones del alma en la psicología medica medieval”, in Comprendre et maîtriser la nature au Moyen âge. Mélanges d’histoire des sciences offerts à Guy Beaujouan, École pratique des Hautes Études, Sciences historiques et philologiques 5; Hautes études médiévales et modernes 73, Geneva, Droz, 1994, p. 181-204. Emotions were not reduced to physical motions in medical treatises: “There are two causes of these accidents of the soul. One of these is the non-corporeal apprehensive power, for there is fear when the soul apprehends something fearful, there is anger when it apprehends something irritating, and so on. The second cause is corporeal, the natural heat or spirit”; Taddeus Alderotti (d. 1295), Expositiones in arduum Aphorismi Ipocratis,Venice, 1527, 381v. The physiological model of the motions of spirits and heat was very popular in discussions of emotions until the seventeenth century.

12 Maino de Maineri, Regimen sanitatis, Paris, 1506.

13 Iohannes Fernelius, Universa Medicina, Lyon, 1578, I.18.

14 Johann Jacob Wecker, Medicinae utriusque syntaxes, Basel, 1601. See also Jodocus Trutfetter, Summa in totam physicen, Erfurt, 1514, Hh1r.

15 See S. knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2006, p. 218-226.

16 Isaac of Stella, Epistola de anima, Patrologia Latina 194, ed. J.- P. Migne, 1875-1890.

17 Anonymous, Liber de spiritu et anima, Patrologia Latina, ed. J.- P. Migne, 40, 782. For various further twelfth-century attempts to combine the divisions of emotions with the distinction between concupiscible and irascible faculties, see also Bernard of Clairvaux, Opera 5, ed. J. Leclercq and H. M. Rochais, Rome, Editiones Cistercienses, 1968, p. 358.18-359.15; William of Saint-Thierry, De natura corporis et animae , ed. and trans. M. Lemoine, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1988, 2.89-91.

18 See Knuuttila 2006, p. 230.

19 “The motive powers are divided into appetitive and aggressive ones. While the appetitive power seeks the good and avoids harm, the aggressive power, which is properly called the irascible, is directed to great and arduous things.” anonymous, De potentiis animae et obiectis, ed. D. A. Callus in “The Powers of the Soul: An Early Unpublished Text”, Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 19, 1952, p. 159.

20 Quaestiones disputatate I. De veritate, ed. R. Spiazzi, Turin, Marietti,1964.

21 De veritate 26.5; Summa theologiae, ed. P. Caramello, Turin, Marietti, 1948-1950; II-1, 25.4.

22 Summa theologiae II-1.23.2.

23 Hugh of st. Victor, De substantia dilectionis, ed.  R. Baron, in Six opuscules spirituels, Sources chrétiennes 155, Paris, Les Éditions du Cerf, 1969, p. 86; cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae II-1.25.2c.

24 John of La Rochelle, Summa de anima, ed. G. Bougerol, Textes philosophiques du Moyen Âge, 19, Paris, Vrin, 1995, p. 256-262.

25 Tractatus quinque ad Primam Secundae, tract. IV, 1.12.5-6, in Opera omnia IV, Paris, Vivès, 1856, 475b.

26 Scientiarum omnium Encyclopaedia, tomus III, Lyon, 1649, 25.

27 Summa in totam physicen Dd3v; Trutfetter’s formulation is somewhat simplified in the above quotation. For the same twelfth-century division between concupiscible and irascible emotions, see also Jacob Thomasius, Philosophia practica continuis tabellis comprehensa, editio secunda, Leipzig, 1667, tab. IX.

28 Von der Artzeney Wider die unvernünfftige Liebe und der zuvorher nöthigen Erkäntnüss Sein Selbst. Oder: Ausübung der Sitten Lehre (Halle, 1696); a reprint with a preface by W. Schneiders in Christian Thomasius, Ausgewählte Werke, Band 11, Hildesheim, Olms, 1999.

29 See Schneiders 1999, p. xi.

30 R. Sorabji, Emotion and the Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000.

31 J. Kraye, “Apatheia and Propatheiai in Early Modern Discussions of the Passions: Stoicism, Christianity and Natural History”, Early Science and Medicine 17 (2012), p. 230-253; L. Alanen, “Emotions in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century”, in S. Knuuttila and J. Sihvola (eds.), Sourcebook for the History of the Philosophy of Mind, Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind 12, Dordrecht, Springer, 2014, p. 499-533.

32 On the Medicine, p. 74-79.

33 On the Medicine, p. 79-81, 84-86, 92-105, 514-517.

34 On the Medicine, p. 88-90, 109.

35 On the Medicine, p. 94-96.

36 On the Medicine, p. 77-81.

37 S. Knuuttila, “Sixteenth-Century Discussions of the Passions of the Will”, in M. Pickavé and L. Shapiro (eds.), Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, New York, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 116-132.

38 Thomas Aquinas refers to this in commenting on Augustine’s remark in De civitate Dei that various passions are volitions: “Augustine applies the notion of will in a large sense to all appetites or he thought that joy and fear and other such things can be applied to the will as similar to the passions in the sensitive appetite.” De veritate 26.3, ad 3. For Augustine’s conception of the will, see Knuuttila, 2006, p. 168-172.

39 On the Medicine, p. 83, 88-89, 113-114, 117-118.

40 For synoptic tables for virtues and other issues of practical philosophy, see Jacob Thomasius, Philosophia practica continuis tabellis comprehensa, editio secunda, Leipzig, 1667; Johann Stier, Praecepta Ethicae sive Philosophiae Moralis, Gotha 1646.

41 On the Medicine, p. 158-170. The third row (Wealth etc.) indicates the motivational basis of the three deviant general orientations; Thomasius refers to the description of the consequences of turning common good into private property in Denis Vairasse’s utopian novel History of the the Sevarambians; p. 160-161.

42 See On the Medicine, p. 363-367; Weitere Erleuterung durch unterschiedene Exempel des ohnlängst gethanen Vorschlags wegen der neuen Wissenschafft anderer Menschen Gemüther erkennen zu lernen, Halle, 1692, ch. 5, explained and partially translated in P. McReynolds and K. Ludwig, “Christian Thomasius and the Origin of Psychological Rating Scales”, Isis 1984 (75), p. 546-553. For Mazarin, see Weitere Erleuterung, 226.

43 On the Medicine, p. 361-363.

44 This is the basis of Thomasius’s criticism of the approaches to mastering emotions in Descartes and Aristotelians; see On the Medicine, 494-500.

45 Thomasius recommends to his readers the Traité de la paix de l'âme et du contentement de l'esprit by Pierre Moulin who was a French reformed pastor; On the Medicine, p. 40-41.

46 For faith and philosophy in Thomasius, see T. Ahnert, “Enthusiasm and Enlightenment: Faith and Philosophy in the Thought of Christian Thomasius”, Modern Intellectual History 2 (2005), p. 153-177.

Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Simo Knuuttila, « On the History of the Tables in Taxonomy of Emotions »L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques [En ligne], 16 | 2016, mis en ligne le 08 juin 2016, consulté le 16 mai 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/acrh/7402 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/acrh.7402

Haut de page

Auteur

Simo Knuuttila

Simo Knuuttila is Professor emeritus of Theological Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion, University of Helsinki, and a Visiting Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. His publications include Modalities in Medieval Philosophy (Routledge 1993), Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Clarendon, 2004, 2006), and numerous articles on the history of philosophy. He is an editor or co-editor of many works, most recently Sourcebook for the History of the Philosophy of Mind (Springer 2014), and the managing editor of The New Synthese Historical Library.
Simo Knuuttila est professeur émérite en éthique théologique et philosophie de la religion à l’université d’Helsinski, et professeur invité au « Collegium for Advanced Studies » d’Helsinki. Il a publié notamment : Modalities in Medieval Philosophy (Routledge 1993), Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Clarendon, 2004), ainsi que de nombreux articles sur l’histoire de la philosophie. Il a édité ou co-édité de nombreux volumes, dont récemment Sourcebook for the History of the Philosophy of Mind (Springer 2014), et dirige la collection The New Synthese Historical Library.

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-SA-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-SA 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search