Differential Psychology Quote du Jour

"Unlike Plato, Aristotle never suggested that there need be a permanent struggle between reason and passion; like Jane Austen, he regarded the passions as expressions of cognitive attitudes which could be gradually altered by the cultivation of new habits of thought. Something of the same conception may perhaps be found in Aquinas and in Hegel. But it is modern Anglo-Saxon philosophy that has thoroughly and conclusively established the intrinsically cognitive and, in that sense, rational nature of emotion."

Oliver LETWIN, 1987, Ethics, Emotion and the Unity of the Self. London : Croom Helm.