The Ancient World: Over the Course of 600 years

ANCIENT WORLD..

• Plato and Aristotle—especially Aristotle and the odd collection that followed him.
• The Stoics in Greece, who said a good deal about emotions before Plato and Aristotle.

ANCIENT WORLD..

• The Stoics in Asia, who made no distinction between mind and heart.
• The Indian concepts of bhava and rasa, which distinguish between a crude and an aesthetically refined emotion, fundamental to an understanding of emotional intelligence.

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18TH CENTURY EUROPE..

• A renaissance of emotional thinking evidenced in the work of David Hume, Adam Smith, and Jean- Jacques Rousseau, who emphasized the “moral sentiments.”

An opponent of philosophical rationalists, Hume held that passions rather than reason govern human behaviour, famously proclaiming that "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." Hume was also a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on emotion or sentiment rather than abstract moral principle.

Smith argued against mercantilism and was a major proponent of laissez-faire economic policies. In his first book, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," Smith proposed the idea of an invisible hand—the tendency of free markets to regulate themselves by means of competition, supply and demand, and self-interest.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778) was a French philosopher and writer of the Age of Enlightenment. His Political Philosophy, particularly his formulation of social contract theory (or Contractarianism), strongly influenced the French Revolution and the development of Liberal, Conservative and Socialist theory.

A consideration of the “good life” in terms of certain kinds of feelings once discussed by the ancient philosophers.

modern European philosophy, particularly phenomenology and existentialism.

Phenomenology is a method to explore the nature of emotional experience, which is not merely physiological but also includes appraisals and valuations of the world, as well as a way in which to engage with what the world is.

Existentialists from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to Heidegger, Camus, and Sartre have noted the dimension of emotional responsibility.

In ancient times, the emotions were thought to happen to us—to be what we suffered. Aristotle coined the term passion essentially to mean suffering.

The existentialists, in particular Sartre, asserted that emotions are strategies, not just evolutionarily derived but part of our experience. They are learned through trial and error over our lives.

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