DEKARTOVA FILOZOFIJA EMOCIJA
DESCARTES’ PHILOSOPHY OF EMOTION

Summary/Abstract: Emotions, or the passions of the soul (as Descartes most frequently calls them), are one of the most complex kinds of „things” in Descartes’ philosophy. They exist as „sensations in a wider sense”: modes of res cogitans which are generated by „the close and intimate union” of res cogitans and res extensa in the form of human body. In other words, emotions have both finite substances as their ratio essendi. Therefore, an adequate description of their ontological structure requires the description of the ontological structure of the body, the description of the ontological structure of thought, and the description of their relationship. We shall attempt to carry out such a description by explicating Descartes’ most comprehensive definition of passions. However, the situation is even more interesting, since the complexity of passions doesn’t only originate from structural properties, but from functional properties as well. While on the basis of Descartes’ text there can be no doubt that he ascribed the motivational function to passions, the situation is not altogether clear when it comes to the representational function. We shall defend the thesis that Descartes’ ascribed an axiological kind of representationality to passions, which differs from the representationality that he ascribed to „ideas in the strict sense”.

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