This paper examines the significance and originality of Hobbes’s use of ‘mind’, rather than ‘soul’, in his writings on human nature. To this end, his terminology in the discussion of the ‘faculties of the mind’ in The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (1640) is considered in the context of English-language accounts of the ‘faculties of the soul’ in three widely-read works from the first half of the seventeenth century: Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604), Robert (...) Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), and Edward Reynolds’s A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man (1640). For Hobbes’s contemporaries, man’s soul conveyed God-like powers to human beings; for Hobbes this is a dangerous idea. Accordingly, he establishes a sharp divide between ‘soul’ and ‘mind’, understanding the two terms to be concerned with two very different things: one with soteriology, the other with mental abilities. Like his contemporaries, Hobbes thought that understanding the faculties reveals the way to live a good life. But unlike them, his moral and political philosophy relies on citizens accepting that they are not like God, rather than looking to restore the ‘divine’ within themselves. (shrink)

This paper argues that Shaftesbury differs from other moral sentimentalists (Hutcheson, Hume, Smith) because he conceives of the moral sentiments as partial and first-personal, rather than impartial and spectatorial. This difference is grounded in Shaftesbury’s distinctive notion that moral self-governance consists in the self-examination of soliloquy. Breaking with his Stoic influences, Shaftesbury holds that the moral sentiments play the role of directing and guiding soliloquy. Because soliloquy is first-personal reflection that is directed to achieving happiness, claiming that the moral sentiments (...) direct soliloquy leads Shaftesbury to conceive of the moral sentiments as arising from the internal perspective of an agent focused on her own happiness. This provides Shaftesbury with a stronger framework for understanding moral sentiments, for it avoids the difficulty of explaining why the sentiments of others or those arising from an imagined spectator’s perspective are motivating or authoritative for us. (shrink)

This essay examines the development of Reformed treatments of the affections in the period of early orthodoxy (ca. 1565-1640). I argue that discussion of the affections during this period grew within the broad framework of the Aristotelian psychology and certain polemical concerns initially established by early Reformed theologians. With the advent of Protestant universities and academies, Reformed ethicists and theologians treated the affections in greater detail, with a majority drawing on a generally Thomistic approach to the nature and division of (...) the affections, although not without a dissenting Scotistic minority. (shrink)

Walter Charleton’s often overlooked treatise, The Natural History of the Passions (1674), offers an eclectic and unique engagement in the seventeenth-century debate about the nature and purpose of...