Stael’s Philosophy of the Passions

Sensibility, or the capacity to feel, played a vital role in philosophical reflection about the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the arts in eighteenth-century France. Yet scholars have privileged the Marquis de Sade’s vindication of physiological sensibility as the logical conclusion of Enlightenment over Germaine de Staël’s exploration of moral sensibility’s potential for reform and renewal that paved the way for Romanticism. This volume of essays showcases Staël’s contribution to th