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[pathos, affectus, Affekt] see also appearance, enthusiasm, gemut, imagination, passion, psychologyThe confusion surrounding this term is compounded by Kant's translators who have variously rendered it as ‘passion’, ‘emotion’ and ‘affection’. Following Strachey's translation of Freud's term Affekt as ‘affect’ helps to clarify Kant's usage, although the term is intrinsically ambiguous. Its ambiguity was already noted by Augustine in the fifth century. He observed in the City of God (426) that ‘these agitations of the soul, which the Greeks call pathe [are described by] some of our Latin authors, Cicero for example … as disturbances [peturbationes], others as affections [affectiones] or affects [affectus], or again as passions [passiones]’ (Augustine, 1972, Book 10, chapter 4). Moreover, Augustine's contrast between the Platonic view that the passions are restrained by reason and the Stoic doctrine of ataraxia (freedom from passion) still underestimates the many meanings given to pathos in classical Greek philosophy.Aristotle uses the term pathos in at least three complementary but distinct senses. First, it denotes a quality whose cause is not constitutive of the definition of its subject (see Aristotle, 1941, 9b, 28); thus change in quality or ‘alteration’ is defined in the Metaphysics as ‘change in respect of an affection [pathos]’ (Aristotle, 1941, 1069b, 12). A second sense emerges ... log in or subscribe to read full text