PHILOSOPHY 442: 17TH AND 18TH CENTURY CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY (PASSIONS, AFFECTS AND SENTIMENTS: THE EMOTIONS IN EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY) [taught with PHIL 546, B1]

B1 Second Term M 14:00-16:50 A.M. Schmitter
Seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy witnessed widespread and vigorous discussion of the emotions. They figured importantly in philosophical treatments of sense-perception, practical reasoning, political philosophy, medicine and aesthetic theory, as well as raising metaphysical and epistemic questions of their own. Alas, their importance, both philosophically and as an episode in the history of philosophy, is less widely appreciated today. We will look at a wide variety of these discussions, trying both to trace the changing fortunes of the treatment of the emotions and to figure out why they were taken to be as central as they were.
Texts: Readings TBA, but certainly including Descartes's Passions of the Soul, parts of Spinoza's Ethics, parts of Hobbes's Leviathan, Books II and III of Hume's Treatise, and works from less well-known continental and British figures. [Note: despite the Philosophy 442 designation, this course will treat both continental and British philosophy.]