From Passions to Emotions
The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category

A significant and original contribution to the ongoing debate about emotion and rationality.

Thomas Dixon (Author)

9780521827294, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 June 2003

300 pages
23.6 x 16 x 2.4 cm, 0.627 kg

'… a most significant and most interesting contribution both to the history of psychology and to the study of relations between the modern scientific world view and religion. … it will substantially alter how writers refer to the history of what we loosely call the 'feelings'. … There has been little systematic history of the 'emotions' before this book, and this book provides a new and firm reference point. … [there] is a much-needed seriousness about the centrality, complexity and subtlety of interrelations between religion and psychology. There is no doubt that ignorance, indifference or antagonism to religion has marked the history of this field. Here we now have a model study that shows what is involved in overcoming this limitation. … very valuable scholarship and persusasive clarity …' British Journal of the History of Science

Today there is a thriving 'emotions industry' to which philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists are contributing. Yet until two centuries ago 'the emotions' did not exist. In this path-breaking study Thomas Dixon shows how, during the nineteenth century, the emotions came into being as a distinct psychological category, replacing existing categories such as appetites, passions, sentiments and affections. By examining medieval and eighteenth-century theological psychologies and placing Charles Darwin and William James within a broader and more complex nineteenth-century setting, Thomas Dixon argues that this domination by one single descriptive category is not healthy. Overinclusivity of 'the emotions' hampers attempts to argue with any subtlety about the enormous range of mental states and stances of which humans are capable. This book is an important contribution to the debate about emotion and rationality which has preoccupied western thinkers throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has implications for contemporary debates.

Acknowledgments
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 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.

Subject Areas: Psychological theory & schools of thought [JMA], History of ideas [JFCX], Christian theology [HRCM]