Abstract

ABSTRACTThis introduction presents a brief overview of the concept of ‘mental power’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and focuses on the issue of how a sample of influential thinkers of that period conceptualized the human agent’s mental abilities and skills as governing perception, action and moral behaviour. This leads to innovative accounts which partially ground, in a broad sense, modern psychology. The representative thinkers included in this special issue are: Descartes, Cudworth, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume and Kant.