Ethics and Metaphysics of Affections
The modern genesis of the present

Accepting the topic of crisis final of the modern epoch in Philosophy, ethics and politics, this project aims to study the intellectual form of this Modernity. The guiding thread of the research will be the modern turn in the study of the affections and/or passions, sustained by a particular metaphysical approach . This enables a sort of anthropological mutation that propitiates a redefinition and new classification of passions and affections, which in turn allow the genesis of an individually happy and politically stable coexistence. 

In the first place, we will study how the production of this new subjectivity makes possible the governability of human life both in its individual-internal and communitarian-external dimension in core topic of freedom and security. The team proposes to investigate especially the passions of fear, hate and love, together with friendship, pity and melancholy, since they are especially linked to that modern freedom and security. The central axis of the research will be Descartes. 

Secondly, the team intends to explore the continuity that the positions of Montaigne, Hobbes and Spinoza can maintain with this thought, bringing them into dialogue, on the one hand, with contemporary debates on the philosophical foundations of affectivity and its link with politics, in which a new and current hermeneutic approach is proposed: Carl Schmitt (sociology of concepts), Ortega (concentric approaches), Leo Strauss (reading between the lines) or Michel Foucault (genealogical analysis, microanalysis); on the other hand, to attend to various fields of the contemporary discussion in which these authors are central references: the psychology of affects, the question of identity, medicine, political theology, totalitarianism. Thus, a thorough understanding of modernity would also entail a critical recovery. 

Finally, project would like to offer a new critical edition of Descartes' The Passions of the Soul and his correspondence on moral and political questions, and Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise.

Specific objectives

1. To rehearse a new narrative about the early modernity of our authors, so that the role played by passions and/or affections in the configuration of the individual and his relationship with society, as well as the configuration of a collective identity, appears as the central axis of his proposal .

2. To pay specific attention to how the pragmatic ends sought by Montaigne, Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza concerning the guarantees of security and individual and societal freedom are intertwined with the governability of the passions, and more specifically what role they play in each of them: fear, love and hatred, together with friendship, pity and melancholy. Passions that, on the one hand, are redefined; on the other, are essential for human life, individually and societally, to grow in freedom and security.

3. To rehearse the politics that Descartes did not write, taking into account his predecessor Montaigne, the viability of a science of politics built or not from metaphysical principles and, finally, to attempt a coherent and complete answer to the reason for the absence of politics in the branches of the Cartesian tree of knowledge.

This project is supported by the Ministry of Science and Innovation "Proyectos de Generación de knowledge 2021".