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This book is the most extensive study in many decades of the virtue temperance. It examines certain interpretive threads of temperance as a virtue beginning in classical philosophy and moving through early to medieval Christian conceptions. Rather than simply offering a normative view of temperance, this book seeks to understand how temperance works to engage and include the experience of emotion in morality. In present-day studies of the psychology of emotion, cognitive theories have reasserted the classical conception of emotion as consisting of both physiological and psychological elements of human personhood. Temperance is the primary virtue in the moral agent's cognitive response to the movements of emotion. Application of the possibilities for this renewal of temperance comes with an examination of how emotion will help moral deliberation in the clinical practice of medicine. Sir William Osler (1849-1919) and his doctrine of aequanimitas is greatly misunderstood to be the founder of emotional detachment in physician/patient relations. This book offers the most detailed look at aequanimitas in print and equates it with a normative view of temperance as a moral virtue. For upper-level undergraduate and graduate-level students interested in ethics, bioethics, and moral psychology; Oslerians; and students of Aristotle's and Aquinas' view of the moral virtues.

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Loma Linda Univ., CA. Extensive study of the virtue of temperance. Examines certain interpretive threads of temperance as a virtue beginning in classical philosophy and moving through early to medieval Christian conceptions. Examines how emotion will help moral deliberation in the clinical practice of medicine. For students