David Konstan

David Konstan is the American classicist whose The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks (2006) is the most disciplined contemporary study of how the Greek vocabulary of affect — anger, pity, fear, shame, envy, gratitude, love — structured the moral and psychological life of the classical polis. Writing from within the cognitive-Aristotelian tradition of emotion theory, Konstan reads pathē as value-laden judgments about the world rather than as pre-cognitive feelings, an approach that puts him in close conversation with Nussbaum and Sorabji.

For the Seba lineage, Konstan is indispensable at the point where the philological reconstruction of Greek affect meets the depth-psychological question of the feeling-function. His work shows, for instance, that Aristotelian orgē (anger) is not “anger” as modern English means the word — it includes the element of perceived injustice and the motion toward redress that the modern term has mostly lost. The tradition’s reading of thumos, aidos, hubris, and pathos stands in this kind of philological discipline. See konstan-emotions-ancient-greeks.

Relationships

• konstan-emotions-ancient-greeks
• pathos
• feeling-function