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Renaut ( O. ) Platon. La médiation des émotions. L'éducation du thymos dans les dialogues . (Histoire des Doctrines de l'Antiquité Classique 45.) Pp. 376. Paris : Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin , 2014. Paper, [euro]38. ISBN: 978-2-7116-2530-7 .
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The central thesis of the book is that emotions - and together with them thumos - are 'intermédiaire et médiateur' (p. 11). This is so because, as is told in the Republic, thumos is the middle part of the soul and its role is to mediate between reason and desire.
In the first part R. begins with an overview of the place of emotions in Greek thought before Plato. He presents Homer's use of moral emotions such as anger (nemesis), high-spirit (thumos) and reverence (aidôs) in depicting human motivation and deliberation. In the Homeric epics thumos is the very seat of sensitivity to other people, to moral norms and to one's own image. Then Plato's early dialogues (Symposium included) are considered in order to account for the importance of emotions in organising and sustaining the moral order on the one hand and their functioning in collective life on the other. R. presents several meanings of thumos, the most important of them being 'spontaneous reaction' (p. 73), the core of several moral emotions such as shame, right anger and restraint. Yet, thumos as such can hardly be a basis for constructing ethics. Finally R. passes on to Socrates' intellectualist approach to emotions which, however, is not about eliminating emotions altogether but about their modification so that they be guided by rational thought. This is feasible since Socrates 'defends a cognitivist conception of desire and emotions' (p. 80). Seen from this angle, an attempt at making emotions more rational or in agreement with reason amounts to putting order into the structure of the soul.
This is what R. analyses in the second part. In the Republic, theorising of the tripartition of the soul is completed by means of explicitly making thumos its middle function or element.