The Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to with the support of the King's College London Philosophy Department and the

LMU in Munich, online at www. History of Philosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about emotions in medieval philosophy with Martin Pekave, who is professor of philosophy and medieval studies at the University of Toronto.

Hi Martin.

Hi Peter, thanks for having me back. Yeah. Okay so today our episode topic is going to be emotions, which is something that has occasionally arisen in the podcast. Maybe the most obvious thing is that I talked about Seneca's treatise on

anger. Obviously that's about an emotion, namely anger, but it's not something that I've

talked about a lot in the series and it may seem a surprising topic for some listeners.

Could you say why philosophers should be interested in emotions?

Yes, I don't think it's surprising because emotions are part of our

mental life a very important part well we might go around the world and only act on

careful deliberation but often we we interact with the world and

our fellow citizens by being angry at them loving them hating, and so on.

So the important part of how we manage to get around.

And philosophers in the mutual periods saw that as well, for example, in Aquinas, who provides at least in terms of pages and words

the most comprehensive account of emotions before the early modern period, he has a whole series of questions in the premise

a kunde in the part on the principles of action so he takes very seriously the

idea that emotions are principles of action and required to be discussed in the same way as, for example, the will and virtues have to be discussed as well because they are also principles of action. That's one reason why

philosophers should be interested in emotions. Another reasons is of course that at

least in classical Australian philosophy course that

the original philosophy emotions are that which are moderated by the virtues so temperance

moderates our desires.

And of course if you want to understand the nature of virtues,

you have to understand the nature of the things that are moderated.

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