R ob B oddice . A History of Feelings

Rob Boddice’s A History of Feelings begins with two major objectives: to avoid using modern categories like emotion and to write the first history of that avoided category over the long haul, from antiquity to the present. It does not quite succeed on either count. To shun the word “emotion,” Boddice resorts to more general terms like “feeling” and “affective life” as if that solves the problem. It does not. Although he spends much time scolding others for mistranslating “feeling words” with modern terms, he himself is often compelled to commit the same sin. To be sure, he is correct to insist that our feelings today are not the same as those of the past, but historians of emotions have been saying so for more than two decades. They have also been trying, like Boddice, to contextualize past words, feelings, emotions, affections—call them what you like—to show how embodied they

Commit · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Feeling · Computer Science · History of Science and Medicine · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology