Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy ed. by Martin Pickavé, Lisa Shapiro (review)

As the editors rightly note, historians of philosophy have paid relatively little attention to the relation between emotions and cognition, focusing instead on their connection to morals. This volume, consisting of thirteen papers all written by well-established scholars, aims to remedy this. It moreover aims to trace the continuities and discontinuities between medieval and early modern discussions of the topic, and to infuse contemporary debates “with a host of new ideas regarding the relationship between emotions, cognition, and reason, or the way emotions figure in our cognitive lives” (2).

The volume clearly succeeds in its first aim. The first few papers show that already within the Aristotelian tradition, philosophers generally argued for some cognitive component involved in the emotions. A noteworthy aspect of this period is the distinctive approach to human passions (emotions) of contrasting these to angelic (disembodied) passions on the one hand and animal (non–rational) passions on the other, as shown by Peter King and by Dominik Perler. A second aspect is the distinction between passions that belong to our sensitive and embodied nature, and those that belong to our rational nature. The latter were labelled ‘passions of the will,’ and are discussed by Ian Drummond and by Claude Panaccio. The link between emotions and cognition became even stronger in the early modern period. Shapiro argues that, for Spinoza, perception itself is always affectionately laden and that “sensations and emotions are thus not different phenomenological kinds” (214). Even understanding is always tied to emotions for Spinoza, as becomes clear from Lilli Alanen’s paper, which details the relation between our imagination and the passions. Also included are papers on Hume (Amy M. Schmitter), Malebranche (Deborah Brown), and Descartes (Dennis Des Chene).

The volume is less successful in its second aim, although the editors included two papers on the Renaissance period. Simo Knuuttila traces the impact of the discussions on the passions of the will in some sixteenth-century authors. He announces that he will also discuss comments by “some other early modern authors” (116), but curiously this part seems to be missing. Sabrina Ebbersmeyer’s paper on Renaissance debates on Platonic love offers an original and intriguing case study on the possible relations between emotions and cognition. The theme is absent in the medieval period and had little impact on early modern authors, but is interesting in its own right. The volume as a whole would have benefited from the inclusion of a contribution focused more directly on the “continuities and discontinuities” in question. Given its impact on seventeenth-century philosophy, a paper on Justus Lipsius’s Neostoicism would have been a welcome addition, especially since several contributors discuss Stoic influences. The contribution by the late Paul Hoffman, lastly, deserves special mention. His paper ranges over all periods in an attempt to find the different ways in which the inclinations of our will have been understood.

The volume mostly succeeds in its third aim. Almost all papers, with the exception of Knuuttila’s, can be recommended to non-specialists, which greatly adds to its usefulness. Equally important is that the contributions convincingly show that many of the philosophers discussed endorsed neither a cognitivist approach nor equated emotions to second order perceptions, which all but guarantees that one will encounter novel views when perusing the volume. And as Pickavé nicely illustrates in his deflationary reading of Adam Wodeham, the issue at stake in discussions on the emotions need not even have been the question whether one should endorse a cognitivist account or not.

Comparing authors from different periods is never easy, and it seems to me that the editors may have underestimated some of the (terminological) difficulties involved. They wisely tackle the first obstacle in their brief introduction, namely that the terms used to designate what we would now call emotions varied (7–8). But this is just one of several difficulties one would likely encounter. To give...