Emotions in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century

Abstract

While seventeenth-century accounts of passions reflected concerns raised in earlier discussions of passions both in the medical tradition and in the moral treatises of the Aristotelian or Neo-Stoic tradition, new issues emerged as the general picture of the physical universe and human nature changed. The traditional approaches still dominated university discussions, but those who endorsed the mechanistic philosophy of nature, such as Hobbes, Descartes, Malebranche, and Spinoza, searched for new ways of explaining and controlling emotions by treating them as natural phenomena obeying the same laws as the rest of nature. The question of the role of reason in governing the passions took on a new urgency within the mechanistic framework.