Philosophy 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.