Volume 3, Number 2, 2022 Emotions in Contexts: Cultural Conceptions in Ancient and Medieval Societies Guest-edited by Douglas Cairns

EN:

Plato and Empedocles depict a universe that manifests beauty, goodness, reason, and bliss. This article aims to investigate why both philosophers felt it important to describe a cosmos that participates in a human emotion such as happiness. First, it will be shown how both Plato and Empedocles could not dispense with embodied human experience, including emotional experience, in the formation of cosmological concepts. Indeed, their respective cosmoi are constructed through notions derived from the conceptual domain of human agency. Second, attention will also be paid to Plato and Empedocles’ reconstruction of the notion of the happy life. The main argument advanced here is that both Plato and Empedocles conceive of their (macro)cosmos as a paradigm of behavior, so that the conception of a happy universe has a significant ethical function at the level of the microcosm, ultimately demonstrating the centrality of the concept of happiness in the doctrines of both authors.

EN:

Sexual desire involves a subjective experience that may differ significantly from one individual to another and is closely linked not only to personal preferences but also to the circumstances of the moment, cultural norms, and social expectations. When experiencing sexual desire, there are not only positive but also negative dynamics at play, and such an experience can also trigger a wide range of emotions that might differ depending on the circumstances of the moment. The aim of this paper is to explore the expression of sexual desire as well as its relationship to a broad spectrum of emotions through a selected group of ancient Egyptian textual sources, such as love songs.

EN:

This article, which continues ideas developed in the context of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: Graduiertenkolleg 1876—215342465 (GRK1876), examines how animals are used in medieval texts to (re)present, shape, and develop the literary representation of emotions. On the basis of selected examples, it shows how diverse the literary functions of animal imagery can be and how many different poetic and aesthetic strategies can be found for staging animals, connecting them with human characters and the recipients of the tale. In this way, animals can serve as objects of cultural self-reflection and as models for philosophical orientation.

EN:

This article applies approaches from current emotion research on material affective scaffolds—objects made and used to enhance, and more generally transform, affective states—to the emerging field of study focusing on emotions in ancient Near Eastern societies. Its main goal is to extend the framework of 4E cognition—with its central notion that human cognition is embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended—to the realm of affective states, emphasizing that through our bodily interactions with material objects we transform not just our cognitive processes but also our emotions, moods, and so forth. Thereby, the present study seeks to contribute to the exploration of the relationships between sensory experiences, emotions, moods, and the material world by investigating the affective meanings that material things acquire through people’s entanglements with them.

The study focuses on one particular class of objects—Mesopotamian amulets from the first millennium BC, which served as bodily adornments but were also understood to have the power to evoke affective responses through their activation in ritual performances. Referring to scholarly compendia in Mesopotamian cuneiform texts, this study demonstrates that these objects were recommended by healing experts to influence different affective states, both in oneself and others. It examines the connection between affective states and specific material features of the amulet components (consisting of minerals, metals, and plant and animal substances). Finally, Mesopotamian views of affective states and their management are compared with those of contemporary cognitive-affective science. This comparison shows that although there are some analogies, there are also important differences that depend mainly on different understandings of the human mind and agency.