Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Thought
- Cambridge Companions to Literature
- The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Thought
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Chronology
- Lexicon of Terms
- Introduction
- 1 Philosophical Thought: Theories of Knowledge and Moral Thought
- 2 Science in the Long Eighteenth Century
- 3 Political and Legal Thought
- 4 Religious Thought: The Defence of Religious Establishment
- 5 Historical Thought
- 6 Wealth and Corruption: Eighteenth-Century Social and Economic Thought in Four Scandals
- 7 Literary and Aesthetic Theory
- 8 Sensibility: Passion, Emotion, Affect
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
8 - Sensibility: Passion, Emotion, Affect
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 June 2021
- The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Thought
- Cambridge Companions to Literature
- The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Thought
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Chronology
- Lexicon of Terms
- Introduction
- 1 Philosophical Thought: Theories of Knowledge and Moral Thought
- 2 Science in the Long Eighteenth Century
- 3 Political and Legal Thought
- 4 Religious Thought: The Defence of Religious Establishment
- 5 Historical Thought
- 6 Wealth and Corruption: Eighteenth-Century Social and Economic Thought in Four Scandals
- 7 Literary and Aesthetic Theory
- 8 Sensibility: Passion, Emotion, Affect
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Summary
This chapter is about sensibility, which is the term that was commonly used in the second half of the eighteenth century to refer to a special capacity to respond with sensitivity to one’s environment. Colloquially understood as the heightened responsiveness of feeling or emotion, sensibility – in cultural, literary, artistic, historical, social, philosophical, and political contexts – reached far beyond what either of these more familiar terms convey. Eighteenth-century thinking about sensibility, in all of its complexity, remains deeply relevant to twenty-first century theories of affect, feeling, and emotion, and provides robust resources for, and in some cases correctives to, current theoretical and philosophical thought.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Thought , pp. 227 - 247Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021