In his final philosophical treatise, The Passions of the Soul (), completed in 1649 and dedicated to Queen Christina of Sweden , René Descartes contributes to a long tradition of philosophical enquiry into the nature of "the passions". The passions were experiences – now commonly called emotions in the modern period – that had been a subject of debate among philosophers and theologians since the time of Plato. The organization of Descartes’ Passions is indicative of the author’s philosophy. Applying his famous method to moral philosophy, Descartes represented the problem of the passions of the soul in terms of its simplest integral components. He distinguishes between six different fundamentally distinct passions: But there aren’t many simple and basic passions... you’ll easily see that there are only six: wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, sadness. All the others are either composed from some of these six or they are species of them. So I’ll help you to find your way through the great multitude of passions by treating the six basic ones separately, and then showing how all the others stem from them. —Descartes, Passions of the Soul, article 69
In his final philosophical treatise, The Passions of the Soul (), completed in 1649 and dedicated to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia , René Descartes contributes to a long tradition of philosophical inquiry into the nature of "the passions". The passions were experiences – now commonly called emotions in the modern period – that had been a subject of debate among philosophers and theologians since the time of Plato. The organization of Descartes’ Passions is indicative of the author’s philosophy. Applying his famous method to moral philosophy, Descartes represented the problem of the passions of the soul in terms of its simplest integral components. He distinguishes between six fundamentally distinct passions: But there aren’t many simple and basic passions... you’ll easily see that there are only six: wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, sadness. All the others are either composed from some of these six or they are species of them. So I’ll help you to find your way through the great multitude of passions by treating the six basic ones separately, and then showing how all the others stem from them. —Descartes, Passions of the Soul, article 69
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Queen Christina of Sweden
Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia
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enquiry
inquiry
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different