This volume of newly commissioned essays marks a collaborative effort among scholars of ancient Greece and early China to investigate discourses of emotions in ancient philosophy, medicine, and literature from c. 5th century BCE-2nd century CE. The aim is to bring scholars working in the two ancient traditions together to explore ways in which cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary investigation might be deployed to advance our understanding of the emotions in these ancient societies, and ultimately, to confront and challenge certain long-standing modern approaches to emotions. The volume not only highlights the diverse ways in which emotions have been portrayed and discussed in different geographical and cultural contexts, but also interrogates the concepts through which writers and thinkers in the past experienced and thought about the emotions. The book takes emotions not as natural givens, but as aspects of human experience and conceptualization whose significance can be properly assessed only within the practices, discourses, and institutions of particular societies. The volume addresses a wide range of topics, such as equanimity and impassivity in Daoism and Stoic thought; therapies of emotions in Greco-Roman and early Chinese medicine and philosophy; the cultivation of emotions in relation to perception, attention, and appraisal in Mengzi and the Stoics; the workings of emotion in Aristotle's moral psychology; models of embodiment in canonical ancient medical texts; the ethics and politics of respect, fear, and awe across time, space and genre; and the social function and expression of contempt in Greek literature. In fostering engagement across traditions and disciplines, the volume seeks to make substantive contributions to existing research in the history and philosophy of emotions, as well as the cross-cultural and global study of emotions.
Douglas Cairns and Curie Virág Introduction 1. Chris Fraser Deviations from the Way, Failures of Virtue: Emotions in Early Daoist Thought 2. P. N. Singer Graeco-Roman Therapy of the Emotions: Medical Techniques, Biological Understandings 3. Elisabeth Hsu The Five Emotions and their Treatment in Chinese Medicine (Suwen 5.3) 4. George Kazantzidis Emotions across the Hippocratic Corpus and the Suwen 5. Ellie Hua Wang Reverence and Reverential Respect in Early Confucian Thought 6. Pia Campeggiani Affective Construals: What Aristotle's Moral Psychology Tells Us about Emotion 7. Eric Hutton Debating the Proper Wei to Rule the State in Early Chinese and Greek Political Philosophy: On the Emotional Influence of Rulers 8. Dimos Spatharas The Phenomenology and Social Uses of Contempt in Ancient Greece 9. Franklin Perkins Judgment, Perception, and Attention in the Cultivation of Emotions: Mengzi and the Stoics 10. Margaret Graver The Stillness of The Sage's Heart: Senecan Apatheia and the Involuntary Feelings 11. G. E. R. Lloyd Afterword
Douglas Cairns is Professor of Classics at the University of Edinburgh. His many previous publications include Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature and, as editor, A Cultural History of the Emotions in Antiquity and Emotions though Time, from Antiquity to Byzantium. Curie Virág is Senior Research Fellow and Co-Project Director in the Department of Classics at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of The Emotions in Early Chinese Philosophy.
