Roman Calendar

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

"Eupathic Responses" from "Stoicism and Emotion"

"Eupathic Responses" from Margaret R. Graver's Stoicism and Emotion:

     "We should expect "that the person of perfect understanding will be capable of every feeling it is in human nature to have. And in fact we do find references in Stoic sources to a class of affects which belong specifically to the normative human. The collective term eupatheiai, 'good emotions' or 'proper feelings,' is attested from an early date and was probably the term used in the early treatises. Cicero . . . offers the Latin term constantiae or 'consistencies.' This may be a rendering of alternative Greek terminology which is now lost, or it may be creative translation: 'consistency' is one way to refer to the logically coherent state of mind which disposes one to experience affects rather than ordinary emotions. . . . [Eupatheiai, or eupathic reponses] are to ordinary emotions what the Stoic sage is to the ordinary person: they are the corrected version, the endpoint of development. We can think of them as normative affect."

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