"Perception and Passion in Dante's Comedy" by Patrick Boyde

Author rereads many of the most dramatic and moving episodes in the Comedy, and shows how knowledge of Dante's philosophical ideas can help us to understand the meaning of his journey toward the source of goodness and truth.

Patrick Boyde argues that the way in which Dante represents what he (or his fictional self) saw and felt was profoundly influenced by the thirteenth-century science of psychology. Professor Boyde offers an authoritative account of the way in which vision and the emotions were understood in Dante's lifetime.




• Important book by eminent Dante scholar
• Second volume of (unofficial) Dante trilogy (following Boyde’s Dante: Philomythes and Philosopher, 1981)
• Interesting connections between Dante and thirteenth-century psychology and philosophy

Table of Contents
Preface
Part I. Coming to terms with Aristotle
1. The prestige and unity of the Aristotelian corpus
2. Movement and change in lifeless bodies
3. Self-change: growth and reproduction in plant life
4. Self-movement: sensation and locomotion in animal life

PART II. The operations of the sensitive soul in man
5. Perception of light and colour
6. Perception of shape, size, number movement, and stillness
7. Imagining and dreaming
8. Body-language and the physiology of passion

PART III. The operations of the rational soul
9. Self-direction: the powers of the mind
10. Aspects of human freedom

PART IV. Combined operations
11. Fear
12. Anger
13. Desire

Notes
Select bibliography
Indexes.



First published 1993
Reprinted 1995
This digitally printed first paperback version 2006