Ritva Palmén – författare

This book focuses on recognition and its relation to religion and theology, in both systematic and historical dimensions. While existing research literature on recognition and contemporary recognition theory has been gradually growing since the early 1990s, certain gaps remain in the field covered so far. One of these is the multifaceted interaction between the phenomena of recognition and religion. Since recognition applies to persons, institutions, and normative entities like systems of beliefs, it also provides a very useful analytic and interpretative tool for studying religion. Divided into five sections, with chapters written by established scholars in their respective fields, the book explores the roots, history, and limits of recognition theory in the context of religious belief. Exploring early Christian and medieval sources on recognition and religion, it also offers contemporary applications of this underexplored combination. This is a timely book, as debates over religious identities, problematic forms of extremism and societal issues related with multiculturalism continue to dominate the media and politics. It will, therefore, be of great interest to scholars of recognition studies as well as religious studies, theology, philosophy, and religious and intellectual history.

This book focuses on recognition and its relation to religion and theology, in both systematic and historical dimensions. While existing research literature on recognition and contemporary recognition theory has been gradually growing since the early 1990s, certain gaps remain in the field covered so far. One of these is the multifaceted interaction between the phenomena of recognition and religion. Since recognition applies to persons, institutions, and normative entities like systems of beliefs, it also provides a very useful analytic and interpretative tool for studying religion. Divided into five sections, with chapters written by established scholars in their respective fields, the book explores the roots, history, and limits of recognition theory in the context of religious belief. Exploring early Christian and medieval sources on recognition and religion, it also offers contemporary applications of this underexplored combination. This is a timely book, as debates over religious identities, problematic forms of extremism and societal issues related with multiculturalism continue to dominate the media and politics. It will, therefore, be of great interest to scholars of recognition studies as well as religious studies, theology, philosophy, and religious and intellectual history.

In recent decades, emotion studies have expanded rapidly across the humanities and social sciences, yet the philosophical analysis of social emotions in premodern thought has remained strikingly underdeveloped. Social Emotions in Premodern Philosophical Thought addresses this gap by examining how late antique and medieval philosophers and theologians understood emotions that are constitutively shaped by social relations—emotions through which individuals negotiate status, normativity, self‑evaluation, and communal belonging. Drawing on a wide range of sources from antiquity to the late Middle Ages, the book shows that social emotions were central to philosophical anthropology, moral psychology, and theological reflection. Combining close textual analysis, historical semantics, and doxography, the book develops a pragmatic taxonomy of social emotions and offers sustained analyses of shame, humility, envy, hope, compassion, love, and anger. Rather than treating emotions in isolation, it reconstructs the networks in which emotions mutually shape, constrain, and educate one another. The study demonstrates how premodern thinkers understood emotions as intentional, value‑laden, and morally significant states that mediate between private experience and public life. By integrating philosophical, theological, and often overlooked monastic sources, the book broadens the canon of the history of philosophy and challenges modern assumptions that sharply separate reason, emotion, and moral agency. This book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in the history of philosophy, medieval studies, theology, and moral psychology, as well as researchers working in contemporary emotion studies who seek historically grounded perspectives on social emotions.