A response to five critiques of Aquinas's doctrine of passion

In five articles directly critical of Aquinas's views concerning the nature of passion or emotion, it is argued that his account is flawed in its lack of emphasis upon the evaluative and rational aspects of passion in favour of its physiological and appetitive qualities. Aquinas's account is characterized by his critics as one which is rooted in and remains mostly at the bodily and the instinctual level, where the passions are little more than natural impulses and accompanying bodily processes set into motion by sensation, movements which are largely distinct from rational judgement or assessment. It would be more in keeping with the apparent rational nature of the passions to stress their evaluative and rational aspects over their physiological and appetitive ones, that is, to describe the nature of passion primarily and essentially in attitudinal or volitional terms, rather than those of "movement" and "appetite".;I argue that these five critiques do not wholly represent Aquinas's thought on the matter. While there is an important bodily, instinctual and impulsive aspect to the passions, these do not exhaustively define what they are for him. Aquinas holds that cognitive, evaluative and rational aspects are equally essential to passion's evocation, continuance and termination. And since there is something of the physiological, the instinctual, and the evaluative in every passion, its essential description requires reference to each of these, if it is to be accurate and complete. In this respect, then, Aquinas's definition of passion is to be understood within the context of the unity, end and perfection of the sensitive being itself. The passional life thus extends beyond its occurrence in the sensitive appetite to include the person's natural and intellectual aspects, both as these are involved in the movements of the sensitive appetite, and as the notion of passion is itself extended to denote phenomena proper to each, phenomena which have their own characteristics which can supplement the experiences of the sensitive appetite. In the transposition of these psychological occurrences into the moral domain, Aquinas's doctrine is shown not only to be more robust than his critics allow, but also to answer effectively their various criticisms.