‘I’ve Got a Little List’

Although taxonomy is often a dull and dusty business, it thrived among seventeenth-century writers on the passions. Most authors followed earlier taxonomies found in Aristotle, the Stoics and Aquinas. But a few adventurous souls such as Descartes and Hobbes produced genuinely innovative enumerations, which differed from what had gone before by identifying different lists and numbers of passions, positing novel principles of divisions, and redrawing ‘family’ groupings. A particularly telling innovation is their identification of distinctive focal passions: wonder for Descartes, and glory for Hobbes. This chapter analyses a few features of these novel enumerations in order to show the important role the leading passions played in developing both their accounts of mind and their distinctive approaches to philosophical explanation as a whole. It also indulges in some meta-historical speculations about the possibility and significance of finding truly divergent conceptions of human affective states in our history.