Power Search
Low Price Guarantee
We Take School POs
Philosophy and the Passions: Toward a History of Human Nature
Contributor(s): Meyer, Michel (Author), Barsky, Robert F. (Translator)

View larger image

 ISBN: 0271020326     ISBN-13: 9780271020327
Publisher: Penn State University Press
OUR PRICE: $44.05  

Binding Type: Paperback - See All Available Formats & Editions
Published: November 2000
Qty:

Annotation: 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?

Click for more in this series: Literature and Philosophy
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Philosophy | History & Surveys - Modern
- Philosophy | Movements - Rationalism
- Philosophy | Criticism
Dewey: 128.37
LCCN: 99047157
Series: Literature and Philosophy
Physical Information: 0.96" H x 5.95" W x 8.93" L (1.08 lbs) 320 pages
Features: Bibliography, Index
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:

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.

Michel Meyer 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?

Contributor Bio(s): Barsky, Robert F.: - 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.Meyer, Michel: - 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).
 
Customer ReviewsSubmit your own review
 
To tell a friend about this book, you must Sign In First!