Wollstonecraft claimed that her love of "the rich torrent of his conversation" made it a "rational passion" rather than emotional or physical infatuation.
The myths of Mirabai, the legendary Hindu poetess-saint, and Antigone, the mythical figure of insurgence in Greek tragedy, are useful in understanding the notion of yearning as a rational passion linked to bodily experiences (1998, chap. 5).
Analogously, the interaction of soul and body gives rise to non-rational movement or passion, while the interaction between intellect and soul brings about rational movement, harmony and virtue (De sera 566A D, 591D F; see Dillon 1977, 194).
Still, those acts of will are analogous to many of our emotions, e.g., love and anger, however much Aquinas balked at calling them 'passions.' He even insisted on occasion that it is appropriate to give a rational appetite and a passion the same name (e.g., 'love') on the grounds that they have similar "movements".
Without passion, any rational person would give up.
Criminals are mostly rational actors (crimes of passion obviously don't apply), and when the costs are rapidly increasing (likelihood of getting caught) and the benefit (value of selling what you steal) rapidly decreasing, some types of crime will be all but eliminated.
I also love its rational approach -- one driven by passion and generosity.
Philosophers have frequently opposed our capacity for rational thought to "the passions", or the emotions, and many have argued that living a good human life involves controlling, subduing, or even eliminating one's emotions and appetites.
Two provocative articles on your April 7 Op-Ed page give one pause: The poet Jorge Valls, whose zeal for civil liberties in Cuba earned him 20 years in prison, called for the return of Elian Gonzalez to his father as the rational right course, political passions aside.
Due cultivation of the mind involves filling it with sound opinion regarding our duty, learning to judge well the objects which commonly stimulate our desires, and acquiring rational control of our passions.
His gags are reminiscent of Tati's mechanized bodily ingenuity, but where Tati was a pointillistic ironist of tightly oscillating frustrations — and a romantic who saw natural passions stifled by rational modernity — Étaix is a well-mannered anarchist for whom passions themselves are corrupted and dubious.
