Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on quotations
- 1 Introduction: from passions and affections to emotions
- 2 Passions and affections in Augustine and Aquinas
- 3 From movements to mechanisms: passions, sentiments and affections in the Age of Reason
- 4 The Scottish creation of ‘the emotions’: David Hume, Thomas Brown, Thomas Chalmers
- 5 The physicalist appropriation of Brownian emotions: Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin
- 6 Christian and theistic responses to the new physicalist emotions paradigm
- 7 What was an emotion in 1884? William James and his critics
- 8 Conclusions: how history can help us think about ‘the emotions’
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - The Scottish creation of ‘the emotions’: David Hume, Thomas Brown, Thomas Chalmers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on quotations
- 1 Introduction: from passions and affections to emotions
- 2 Passions and affections in Augustine and Aquinas
- 3 From movements to mechanisms: passions, sentiments and affections in the Age of Reason
- 4 The Scottish creation of ‘the emotions’: David Hume, Thomas Brown, Thomas Chalmers
- 5 The physicalist appropriation of Brownian emotions: Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin
- 6 Christian and theistic responses to the new physicalist emotions paradigm
- 7 What was an emotion in 1884? William James and his critics
- 8 Conclusions: how history can help us think about ‘the emotions’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
A difference of words is, in this case, more than a mere verbal difference. Though it be not the expression of a difference of doctrine, it very speedily becomes so … The first great subdivision, then, which I would form, of the internal class, is into our intellectual states of mind, and our emotions.
Thomas Brown, Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 100–2Philosophy of the mind in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
By around 1850 the category of ‘emotions’ had subsumed ‘passions’, ‘affections’ and ‘sentiments’ in the vocabularies of the majority of English-language psychological theorists. It had become the most popular standard theoretical term for phenomena such as hope, fear, love, anger, jealousy and a wide variety of others. This chapter examines texts reflecting that transition. Having been concerned, so far, predominantly with the works of theologians, preachers and religious thinkers, I now want to examine a more secular philosophical tradition. In this chapter my focus will be on works of ‘mental science’ produced during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially by certain Scottish empiricist philosophers and their followers. Before moving on to that part of the story, a few introductory words about the differences between various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century schools of philosophy of mind will help to set the scene and to introduce some perhaps unfamiliar terminology.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- From Passions to EmotionsThe Creation of a Secular Psychological Category, pp. 98 - 134Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003