Anger in Thomas Aquinas and Han-full Anger

The goal of this dissertation is to bring together in conversation Aquinas's thoughts on anger and the han (恨)-full anger as a culture-bound syndrome in South Korean people and society, and to make a constructive proposal for working with the anger of the han-filled. Aquinas' ontological cognitivist theory of passion and anger in particular provides a useful hermeneutical tool to analyze and articulate the inner structure of han-full anger and its moral character. The study of han-full anger offers Aquinas’s normative language of anger a chance to encounter the etymological and phenomenological reality of embodied anger and further the life of its bearer living in a marginalized life. Finally, Aquinas’s virtue ethics, taken together with han studies, suggests a modified way to work with the han-full anger.