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.
Paderborn University, Germany - ORCID: 0000-0002-4394-7531
Titolo del capitolo
Humors, Passions, and Consciousness in Descartes’s Physiology: The Reconsideration through the Correspondence with Elisabeth
Autori
Jil Muller
Lingua
English
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0169-8.05
Opera sottoposta a peer review
Anno di pubblicazione
2023
Copyright
© 2023 Author(s)
Licenza d'uso
Licenza dei metadati
Titolo del libro
Reading Descartes
Sottotitolo del libro
Consciousness, Body, and Reasoning
Curatori
Andrea Strazzoni, Marco Sgarbi
Opera sottoposta a peer review
Numero di pagine
206
Anno di pubblicazione
2023
Copyright
© 2023 Author(s)
Licenza d'uso
Licenza dei metadati
Editore
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
Collana
Knowledge and its Histories