Passionate Deliberation

This volume is an extensive study of the virtue of temperance. It examines certain interpretive threads of temperance as a virtue beginning in classical philosophy and moving through early to medieval Christian conceptions. Rather than simply offering a normative view of temperance, this book seeks to understand how temperance works to engage and include the experience of emotion in morality. In present-day studies of the psychology of emotion, cognitive theories have reasserted the classical conception of emotion as consisting of both physiological and psychological elements of human personhood. Temperance is the primary virtue in the moral agent's cognitive response to the movements of emotion. Application of the possibilities for this renewal of temperance comes with an examination of how emotion will help moral deliberation in the clinical practice of medicine.