Late Scholastic Theories of the Passions: Controversies in the Thomist Tradition

Abstract

Thomas Aquinas set the agenda for later medieval discussions of the passions: the masterful analysis in his “Treatise on the Passions”(STIallae.2248) largely eclipsed the work of his predecessors, discussing the material with such depth and clarity that later thinkers could do no better than to begin with his account, even when they disagreed with it. He found order and structure in the apparent chaos of feelings, emotions, and moods: eleven essentially distinct species of passion, sorted into two kinds and for the most part occurring in conjugate pairs — the six concupiscible passions of love and hate, desire and aversion, joy and sadness; the five irascible passions of hope and despair, confidence and fear, and, the lone passion with no counterpart, anger.