Abstract

Descartes’ account of emotion conflict in the Passions of the Soul has recently been the subject of Shapiro’s essay (2003), who claims that agent evaluation of the human good operates as an explanatory factor for the reformation of existing mind-body associations. On the contrary, it is here argued that this passion reformation involves explicit reasoning processes, and that the tendency to promote the good of the human being either denotes the cause and not the reason for the original passion formation or is a specific reasoning method. Passion reformation does not seem to be essentially related to the problem of mind-body union.