The revival of philosophical interest in emotions from the middle of the twentieth century can be traced to an article by Erroll Bedford (1957), and a book by Anthony Kenny (1963) which argued against the assumption that emotions are feelings, impervious to either will or reason.
His incisive style combines wit and sympathy, depicting Svevo's wife, for example, as "mild, loving, literal, religious in a convent-educated way, responsive to Svevo's feelings and quite impervious to his ideas".
There is nothing I can buy that will make me impervious to the feeling of lack.
The many blessings in my life formed into a feeling of invincibility; I felt impervious to misfortune.
"Touch!" G.K. seemed impervious to the attention.
But the novel is leavened by touches of magical realism: a president's mistress has a tail; Kiki's brother stretches or shrinks, depending on the state of his love life; and Kiki himself for a time grows a carapace that makes him impervious to both feelings and bullets.
I would love to believe that the Holy Spirit worked a miracle in his life, and he had a vision of the harm he had done and began to question his lifelong, faithful commitment to cruelty, impervious to the feelings of others.
The U.S., too, in its policy toward Indo-China, has sacrificed everything to considerations of prestige, & has been impervious to pity & human feeling.
The size of someone's reputation, or the scale of their brilliance, or the noughts on their salary, does not make anyone impervious to going home and feeling distressed.
