Abstracts

Lilli Alanen
“Spinoza on Passions and Self-Knowledge: The Case of Pride”
For Spinoza, understanding the causes and properties of passions helps to free us from the bondage of passions. Exactly how this is supposed to happen is far from obvious. It involves transforming what is merely passive into activity, what we passively undergo into something that we do, where the doing is rational activity. Understanding how this works involves some clarity about the subject (mind or soul). This paper considers how the problem of the self comes up in Spinoza's account of the passions. It focuses on his account of pride and how this passion both reveals and obscures the self from a proper cognitive grasp, and its aim is to shed light on Spinoza's views of self-cognition.

Dennis Des Chene
“Showing Emotions”
Some theories of the passions in the seventeenth century offer, at least implicitly, a solution to what might be called the Other Hearts problem: how do I know the feelings of others? The answer to that problem consists in examining a subset of the effects of the passions, namely, what were then, and still are, called their "expressions". The questions I will look at here are two: first, how did philosophers distinguish expressions of passions from their other effects? and second: to what extent was the expression of a passion adequate evidence that the "expresser" is in fact feeling that passion?

Paul Hoffman
“Passions as causes of action and the freedom of the will”
How do the passions influence the will? Do they provide reasons for acting? Do they cause acts of will? Or when we talk about passions inclining the will to action do we mean something else? Is the point of saying that passions incline the will without compelling it that the passions don't cause volitions or rather that our volitions can be caused without being necessitated? I will examine the views of various medieval and early modern philosophers to address these questions. I am also interested in ascertaining out how these answers impact accounts of freedom of will. Is talk of the passions inciting the will meant to explain how the will's freedom can be preserved or how it can be undermined?

Simo Knuuttila
“Sixteenth-century Discussions of the Passions of the Will”
Duns Scotus's theory of the passions of the will was an important innovation in late medieval discussions of emotions. This was extensively dealt with in the sixteenth century, partially because it was contrasted with Aquinas's view of emotions by Cardinal Cajetan and some other Dominicans. I shall follow the history of this controversy and other discussions of Scotus's theory, particularly attending to how sixteenth-century authors understood the Scotist idea of associating emotions with the intellect.

Dominik Perler
“Do Lambs Experience Fear? Medieval Debates on Animal Passions”
We commonly attribute emotions to non-human animals, saying, for instance, that chimpanzee mothers love their babies. Do animals really have emotions? Or do we simply anthropomorphize their behaviour? These questions, frequently asked in contemporary cognitive ethology, were already discussed by medieval philosophers. They claimed that animals must have some kind of emotional experience, even if it differs from human experience. Avicenna's example of the lamb fearing the wolf started a long debate on the structure and function of animal passions. My aim is to show that explanations of animal passions were central to a general account of the cognitive content and motivational force of passions.

Peter King
“Dispassionate Passions”
In this paper, I consider the history and development of a theory of "dispassionate passions" -- emotional states that apply only to the intellect, or to a disembodied soul or an angel; they are perhaps most familiar in Spinoza's "amor intellectualis Dei". The origins of the theory are Stoic, and pass into the Middle Ages by Augustine. The theory is taken up by several of the philosophers of High Scholasticism as the "pure" form of emotion. Not all philosophers countenanced such dispassionate passions, though, and I will look at several attacks on the theory as well.

Martin Pickavé
“Adam Wodeham and his Critics on Emotions as Cognitions”
In the first half of the 14th century, the Oxford philosopher Adam Wodeham defended the claim that emotions are themselves forms of cognitions (instead of just begin caused by preceding acts of cognition) and he described them as propositional attitudes. Wodeham?s interesting account of emotions, which has recently been studied in some detail by Knuuttila and Perler, triggered many critical reactions, for instance by Gregory of Rimini and Peter of Ailly. I my paper I examine those reactions and I will argue that by disagreeing with Wodeham, his critics do not intend to hold that emotions are non-cognitive mental states, but that their cognitive dimension has to be accounted for in a different way than by simply making them into one particular kind of cognitions.

Lisa Shapiro
“How we experience the world: passionate perception in Descartes and Spinoza”
We can understand 'experience of the world' in two senses: the expression might refer to sensory experience; or it might refer to our feelings or emotional experience. Are these two senses related? I argue that for both Descartes and Spinoza they are. Both take it that our affective or passionate experience affects that content of our sensory experiences. However, they both also acknowledge that sensory experience can elicit emotions. I further argue that we can reconcile these apparently conflicting commitments drawing a distinction between passions (or affects, for Spinoza) we are merely aware of and those we self-consciously experience. Affective or passionate awareness impacts sensory experience. However, with conscious sensory experience We can, however, come to make feelings explicit and so experience them in a different way.