Topics Emotion

Question Has anyone written about platonism with regard to emotions? I know that philosophers have written about platonism with respect to beauty and love, and while those are not proper emotions (at least, beauty is not an emotion), experiences of them certainly involve emotion. Has anyone written about platonism regarding, say, sadness? Couldn't a state of affairs be considered, in Plato's language, an instantiation of the form of sad events? Given the role of emotion in moral reasoning and love and appreciation of beauty, it isn't clear to me why platonism wouldn't apply to other instances of emotions.

Accepted:
March 22, 2012

Comments

There have been a number of philosophers in the Platonic tradition who have attended to sadness and the whole order of emotions in terms of proper pleasure and pain. You can find the latter in Aristotle, and more explicitly in Augustine's idea that there is an ideal order of love (ordo amoris), proper things we should feel delight or sadness in. In the modern era, one of the more fascinating philosophers to think systematically about values in the Platonic tradition (but he is no commentator on Plato, he is working out a novel ethic) is Max Scheler (1874-1928). You might find his book Formalism in Ethics and the Non-Formal Ethics of Value fascinating.