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 researchers working in contemporary emotion studies who seek historically grounded perspectives on social emotions.