This study examines the emotion of compassion with a focus on the views of Aristotle and Rousseau. Aristotle’s account, as developed in the Ethics, Rhetoric, De Anima, and Poetics, presents a conception of compassion that exhibits both cognitive and physical aspects, operative in multiple spheres of life as well as fiction. Rousseau’s treatment, in the Second Discourse and Emile, brings out the pedagogical, pre-moral, pre-social, and pre-political role of pity, while showing how the harmonious blending of pity and reason results in virtue and the attainment of moral agency. In addition to considering the theories of emotion in Aristotle and Rousseau, this project will discuss contemporary psychological and neuroscientific theories. My understanding of compassion shares with such cross-disciplinary approaches the view that cognitive and physical experiences combine to produce a complex emotion. While drawing attention, with the help of Aristotle and Rousseau, to the specific contexts in which compassion is found, and taking into account cognitive and phenomenological perspectives, the goal of this inquiry is to lay bare the moral value of the emotion. In the end, the study will demonstrate what can be gained, conceptually, phenomenologically, and ethically by focusing on the major philosophical accounts of emotion to be found in Aristotle and Rousseau.