“Ne pas craindre la mort”: Descartes and the passion of fear from a moral and political perspective
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/isegoria.2024.71.1542Keywords:
Generosity, Freedom, Fear, Passion, WillAbstract
Descartes has been considered a thinker disinterested in political questions, given that he hardly addressed the subject in his correspondence and did not publish anything on the subject, despite the conflictive circumstances in the Europe of his time, and the consequent development of political philosophy in early modernity. In this article, starting from a secondary passion in Descartes' Passions of the Soul, fear, we will show to what extent it is possible to see in Cartesian thought a precedent, inspirer or adversary, of many of the political positions of contemporaries such as Hobbes, and of post-Cartesian polemicists such as Spinoza.
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Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
Grant numbers PID2021-126133NB-I00;GIUV2013-037