Ego in Love. Descartes’s Account of Love (Passions of the Soul, §§ 79-83) and its Thomistic Background

The definition of love given by Descartes in the Passions of the Soul (art. 79-84) has never stopped puzzling commentators. By tracing back Descartes’s scholastic sources (namely Aquinas’s treatises on the passions and charity in the Summa Theologiae), we will demonstrate how Descartes builds up his definition of love by displacing or subverting the meaning of several major elements of the thomistic vulgata on love.

Alberto Frigo received his PhD in Philosophy from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and the University of Caen Basse-Normandie in 2010.  He has taught at the Universities of Caen and Paris Sorbonne and he has been F. A. Yates fellow at the Warburg Institute of London. He is currently lecturer at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne (France). He has published widely in the fields of modern philosophy, history of ideas and history of theology.  He is the author of two books on Pascal (L’évidence du Dieu caché. Introduction à la lecture des Pensées de Pascal, 2015;  L’esprit du corps. La doctrine pascalienne de l’amour, Vrin, forthcoming) and he edited Montaigne's correspondance (Le Monnier, 2010) and his translation of Raymond Sebond’s Theologia naturalis (Garnier, 2. vol., forthcoming).

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