The Poverty of Ordinary Language to Express Emotions: Aquinas’s Theory of the Emotion (83422)

Session Information:

Saturday, 4 January 2025 17:00
Session: Poster Session 1
Room: 3F Hallway
Presentation Type: Poster Presentation

All presentation times are UTC-10 (Pacific/Honolulu)

Since the emotional/affective turn that took place in the late 1990s, the topic of emotions has received attention as a sign of profound reshaping of a broad range of academic disciplines, such as history, literature, anthropology, political science, and other branches of the humanities. The nexus between emotions and language emerges as a particularly salient theme within this discourse. In a treatise that delineated the pathways to be taken by later studies, an American philosopher and psychologist, William James reduced emotions to the feelings of its bodily symptoms and said that no further explanation could be given. However, why does the articulation of individual emotions into words remain so elusive? One plausible explanation can be gleaned from the emotional theory propounded by Thomas Aquinas, the medieval Christian philosopher. According to Aquinas, the absence of proper terms for the emotion has something to do with the difference between how the intellect relates to its "product" in the act of understanding and how the intellect relates to the appetite’s product in the act of feeling; the difference is indicated by saying that the true is "in the soul" whereas the good is not in the soul, but "in things". By considering the relationship between emotions and words based on Aquinas, I would like to provide a theoretical basis and materials for various academic disciplines to consider emotions.

Authors:
Ryosuke Matsumura, Fuji Women's University, Japan


About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Ryosuke Matsumura is currently an Associate Professor at Fuji Women's University, Japan.

Additional website of interest
https://researchmap.jp/vie-a-la-vie

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Posted by Clive Staples Lewis

Last updated: 2023-02-23 23:45:00