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Humors, Passions, and Consciousness in Descartes’s Physiology: The Reconsideration through the Correspondence with Elisabeth

  • Jil Muller

By pushing Descartes to more clearly explain the union of body and soul beyond the functioning of a ‘strong’ passion, namely sadness, Elisabeth wants Descartes to review his idea of the passions, and his understanding of the ‘theory of the four humors’. This chapter aims at showing that Descartes turns away from Galen’s theory of the humors, which he globally adopts in the 1633 Treatise of Man. With the shift in his conceptualization of the humors between this Treatise and the Treatise of the Passions (1649), Descartes analyzed more specifically the inner feelings, consciousness, and the passions, by considering that a man is not simply a body, but a psychophysical being, with a body and a soul.

  • Keywords:
  • René Descartes,
  • Elisabeth of Bohemia,
  • passions,
  • humors,
  • animal spirits,
  • consciousness,
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Jil Muller

Paderborn University, Germany - ORCID: 0000-0002-4394-7531

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  • Publication Year: 2023
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  • Content License: CC BY 4.0
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  • Publication Year: 2023
  • Content License: CC BY 4.0
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Chapter Information

Chapter Title

Humors, Passions, and Consciousness in Descartes’s Physiology: The Reconsideration through the Correspondence with Elisabeth

Authors

Jil Muller

Language

English

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-0169-8.05

Peer Reviewed

Publication Year

2023

Copyright Information

© 2023 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Bibliographic Information

Book Title

Reading Descartes

Book Subtitle

Consciousness, Body, and Reasoning

Editors

Andrea Strazzoni, Marco Sgarbi

Peer Reviewed

Number of Pages

206

Publication Year

2023

Copyright Information

© 2023 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Publisher Name

Firenze University Press

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-0169-8

ISBN Print

979-12-215-0168-1

eISBN (pdf)

979-12-215-0169-8

eISBN (epub)

979-12-215-0170-4

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Knowledge and its Histories

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