JULIA MAIA PEIXOTO CAMARGO

This work aims to study the rehabilitation of the passions in Augustine's writings, with an emphasis on three main approaches: psychological, rhetorical, and moral. To this end, the first step involves gathering the vocabulary inherited from Latin translations to refer to these movements of the soul that the Greeks called πάθη (pathē). Augustine uses terms such as disturbances, affections, emotions, passions, and occasionally libido, not always as synonyms, and does so through a complex critical reworking of ancient philosophical theories on affective life. To reconstruct Augustine’s critique of the philosophers who preceded him, we will focus on two main axes: the divergence concerning the relationship between the soul and the body, and the relationship between the rational and the irrational. Thus, following the studies of Brachtendorf (1997), Bermon (2003), Bouton-Touboulic (2013), and Saxcé (2024), our broader aim will be to investigate whether, beyond terminological precision, it is possible to outline an Augustinian theory of the passions, even in the absence of a specific treatise on the subject within his vast and diverse corpus.