Thinking Feeling

This chapter locates the place of the passions in early modern theories of cognition as an embodied process that belongs to both humans and animals. The central focus is on the relationship between thinking and feeling in Thomas Wright’s Passions of the Mind and the scholastic traditions Wright draws on and reformulates. The chapter also traces the beginnings, in the later seventeenth century, of a materialist psychology of the passions that is the distant ancestor of contemporary theories of affect. But the accounts of the passions that dominate most of the early modern period presuppose a more intimate relationship between thinking and feeling, articulating passionate response as a central part of the way the human animal negotiates and makes sense of its world.