Passions, affections, and emotions: a coherent pyrrhonian approach
May we plan to conduct our everyday life without referring to any kind of emotion or passion? Or, more radically, may we suppose that there is a philosophical theory claiming to either eliminate all affections or to at least control them thanks to a strong and prescriptively binding use of a form of rationality? Against the background of such dogmatic presuppositions, what about Pyrrhonists? Do they really ignore the multifarious, difficult, and complex web of all those passions and emotions that crowd and sometimes influence or change the course of our everyday life? If we carefully analyze Sextus Empiricus’s rich corpus, we find that he examines the ethical role, moral weight, and operative function of emotional attitudes. Accordingly, in some relevant passages on which I shall focus my attention, Sextus considers the passionate elements of our agency in order to show at least two important features of the Pyrrhonian moral stance: 1. the existence and pertinence of a ‘theoretical impassivity’, which is however limited to the realm of opinions; and 2. the plain acceptance of some natural affections, defended against the background of a new idea of behaviouristic and pragmatic dispositions.