This article examines Spinoza’s notion of “imitation of the affects” from the per spective of its epistemological, anthropological and ethico-political ambiguities. The article proposes to make sense of these ambiguities on the basis of the more general development of Spinoza’s thought to which the Ethics, when read from a genetic point of view, bears witness, and of which the introduction of “imitation” is one aspect.

Spinoza, Imitation, Conatus, Imagination, Virtue

This article identifies an intermediate position in Leibniz’s moral thought between deontological and sentimentalist morality. Whereas in his early writings obliga tions towards others are derived from obedience to God, Leibniz later comes to con ceive of “charity” towards others as a state of mind that arises spontaneously in those whose intellect can identify convergences between different interests (“per ceiving harmony”) and imagining feelings and judgments of other agents (“put ting oneself in the other’s place”). On this basis, Leibniz would be able to outline an “ethics of recognition” (rather than a kind of “ethics of law”) which has origi nal characteristics and clearly anticipates the later philosophies of “dialogue” or discourse, although never emancipated from the theological dimension and rath er proposed as an interpretation of evangelical precepts. In the last part of the es say, the author also examines the limits of this approach, based on the attempt to universalize a model of relationship that is originally and typically interpersonal.

Charity, Wisdom, Moral Recognition, Leibniz and Pufendorf, Pro spectivism

The aim of this article is to highlight the difference between pity and sympathy, and thereby underscore the originality of Rousseau’s moral philosophy and its im plications in social criticism. As a sentiment, pity presupposes education and a gradual extension to humanity as a sentient community. As a social virtue, it pre supposes the equality that laws aim to establish. Therefore, pity does not make so cial relations more fluid; it rather highlights the scandal of inequality.

Self-Love, Sympathy, Virtue, Rousseau, Smith

By analyzing the status and functions of sympathy in Smith and Hume, we can understand how the moral and social spheres of human conduct are articulated in modern civil society. With Smith, the operator of sympathy reconstructs the so cial genesis of moral distinctions and establishes the separation of the moral sphere from human social conduct. With Hume, sympathy operates in all human rela tions and, for this reason, poses in a different way the connections between the moral and the social. On one hand, with Smith, sympathy leads to the control of affective intensities to enable the deployment of moral conduct. On the other, with Hume, because sympathy can, according to circumstances, increase or decrease the affective intensities that motivate human relationships, it makes it necessary to develop a «policy», i.e., artifices that attenuate the consequences of the ordinary play of human nature’s tendencies. 

Smith, Hume, Sympathy, Human Relationship, Passions

The first treatises on acting published in France in the 18th century offer a unique perspective for analysing the notion of sympathy. Although the word “sympa thie” was not used in France to mean empathy, and compassion is only a partial aspect of it, these treatises explore how the art of acting intersects with the theory of passions and the realm of human emotions, and thoroughly examine whether actors must truly share the feelings of the characters they portray to evoke those same feelings in their audiences. By studying the shift from the emotionalist theo ries of Luigi Riccoboni and Pierre Rémond de Sainte-Albine to the anti-emotion alist theories of François Riccoboni and Diderot, a new principle seems to emerge: the transmission of passions may rely not only on the sharing of a true emotion (whether negative or positive, pity or sympathy), but also on the mere observation by the audience of the physical effects of an emotion not actually experienced by the actor. Applied to real life, this principle suggests a theory of emotional trans mission in which the feelings that move us are not necessarily deeply felt by the person displaying them but are effectively communicated through their visible physical effects.

Luigi Riccoboni, François Riccoboni, Diderot, Simpathy, Theories of Acting

The English 18th century is the century of the landscape. The wide-ranging de bate on the aesthetics and positioning of garden art questions the problem of the shaping of nature and its representation. Natural landscape and pictorial land scape share the same problem: which mimetic principle should they be inspired by? What does it mean to imitate nature? Sympathy is called upon to answer these questions, a category that expresses a principle of synthesis of differences, of uni ty in the multiplicity, which lends itself well to replacing the Aristotelian-derived mimesis on which the unity of representation is based in the modern. Through sympathy it is then a question of interrogating relationality as such, that capac ity of nature to express interconnection that will be at the heart of Alexander von Humboldt’s ecology.

Sympathy, Landscape Garden, Landscape Painting, Mimesis, Nature

The essay starts with an analysis of friendship and love for the other in Leibniz to reflect on his youthful view of the animal (brute) as distinct from the person, closely linked to the concept of justice and public law. The author then examines Kant’s po sition on animality, benevolence and love by tracing the Leibnizian motifs. 

Leibniz, Kant, Animal, Right, Benevolence

Within the recent resurgence of interest in emotion in politics and the sentimental ethics of empathy in early modern philosophy and literature, I focus on an under studied topic: sympathy for the suffering on the scaffold, that is, the paradoxical sym pathy that the lower classes seem to feel for the (future) executed. Before and during the French Revolution, Rousseau, Marivaux and de Grouchy attempted to explain the moral, aesthetic and political implications of the fascination that the spectacle of public executions evoked. In novels and chronicles that anatomized the mentality of the common people, especially the common people of Paris. Alongside a curiosity that led to an unprecedented emergence of popular culture, Marivaux identifies a chameleon-like popular sympathy for human suffering. Against the epistemological backdrop of an enlightened desire for knowledge beyond Christian prohibition, both Rousseau and de Grouchy emphasize the moral solidarity of the ordinary spectator with the future condemned to death, regarded as an equally vulnerable human be ing. But de Grouchy goes beyond passive humanitarianism to consider the institu tional conditions of active citizenship that might transform popular ambivalence to wards the spectacle of public executions into a stable civic solidarity.

Public Executions, Sympathy, Rousseau, Marivaux, de Grouchy

During her short life, Flora Tristan experienced the pain that arises from socio economic inequality and male domination. She consistently felt excluded and un touchable, akin to an Indian Pariah. However, instead of being defeated by this feeling, she transformed it into a theoretical weapon to reclaim freedom and equal ity. By deeply empathizing with her sorrows, she shared them with others and ul timately formulated a socialist theory rooted in sympathy. According to Tristan, socialism wasn’t merely a social and economic theory; it was a practical necessity born from the fact that she actually felt in her heart the dreadful sound of the iron spoon, which foretold the suffering and death of thousands of English workers compelled to drink the contaminated water of the Thames.

Flora Tristan, Socialism, Sympathy, Love, Pain