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This article examines uses of the word emotion during the seventeenth century, arguing that the term's meaning at this time was in flux. OED gives three principle definitions of emotion, the first as meaning 'political turmoil or agitation', the second as meaning literally 'movement or motion', and the third as meaning 'strong feelings or passing'. I argue that a great many uses of emotion during the seventeenth century apply the word in the second sense to the physiological movements of humours. This being so, I suggest that in emotion's seventeenth-century uses it is possible to read a transition in the word's meaning. Through its frequent use with references to humours in motion, the word begins to take on the characteristics which would allow it to develop into meaning 'feelings or passions'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1665, Spinoza thought about what, in the western tradition, has been called philosophy: their forms have established specific context about how the knowledge of things and the men must be. The war between England and Holland, in 1665, as well as the writing --in process-- of the Theological-Political Treatise, allowed him to distinguish between philosophy and philosophizing. The last one requires the work of shaping an exposition which includes both the explanation of ideas product of reason, as well as those derived from the passions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]