Social Emotions in Premodern Philosophical Thought

In recent decades, emotion studies have expanded rapidly across the humanities and social sciences, yet the philosophical analysis of social emotions in premodern thought has remained strikingly underdeveloped. Social Emotions in Premodern Philosophical Thought addresses this gap by examining how late antique and medieval philosophers and theologians understood emotions that are constitutively shaped by social relations-emotions through which individuals negotiate status, normativity, self- evaluation, and communal belonging. Drawing on a wide range of sources from antiquity to the late Middle Ages, the book shows that social emotions were central to philosophical anthropology, moral psychology, and theological reflection.Combining close textual analysis, historical semantics, and doxography, the book develops a pragmatic taxonomy of social emotions and offers sustained analyses of shame, humility, envy, hope, compassion, love, and anger. Rather than treating emotions in isolation, it reconstructs the networks in which emotions mutually shape, constrain, and educate one another. The study demonstrates how premodern thinkers understood emotions as intentional, value-laden, and morally significant states that mediate between private experience and public life. By integrating philosophical, theological, and often overlooked monastic sources, the book broadens the canon of the history of philosophy and challenges modern assumptions that sharply separate reason, emotion, and moral agency.This book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in the history of philosophy, medieval studies, theology, and moral psychology, as well as to researchers working in contemporary emotion studies who seek historically grounded perspectives on social emotions.

About the Author

Ritva Palmén is a Finnish Academy Research Fellow affiliated with the Universities of Helsinki and Eastern Finland. Her research focuses on the history of philosophy, medieval philosophical theology, and philosophical approaches to emotion. Her recent publications include the co-edited volumes History of Mind: Studies in the Philosophy of Simo Knuuttila (2024) and Recognition and Religion: Contemporary and Historical Studies (2019). She is the author of the monograph Richard of St. Victor's Theory of Imagination (2014) and has published articles in leading international journals, including Speculum and the Journal for Medieval and Early Modern Studies .