| This dissertation examines Aquinas's teaching on the acts specific to temperance. According to a widespread interpretation of this teaching (e.g., G. Simon Harak, Jean Porter, Romanus Cessario), the proper act of temperance is spontaneous, ordinate passion. Temperance thus not only causes someone to experience the right passions towards the right objects (an uncontroversial point) but does so antecedent to (i.e., independent of) reason's command. (Passion may be experienced in two ways, antecedent or consequent to reason's command.) Indeed, temperance is thought to have little if anything to do with reason's control of the passions. In an introductory chapter, I show that this understanding of temperance faces a number of serious objections. In the next four chapters, I develop the thesis that the proper act of temperance is ordinate, consequent passion alone; the only relation temperance has to antecedent passion is simply to prevent it from ever being vehement, affecting only its intensity, not its ordination.; I develop my thesis by examining Aquinas's teaching on the passions, which can only be consistently ordinate if commanded by reason (chapter 2); reason's control of the passions, which can be consistent only if the sense appetite (the power whose motions are passions) is habituated to obey reason alone, thus preventing it from being moved by any of the external or internal sense powers (intermediary powers used by reason to command the sense appetite) when they move antecedent to reason's command (chapter 3); habit, which is not a principle of spontaneous action or passion, but is rather something we use only when we will (chapter 4). Temperance is thus a habit that gives reason nearly complete control of the passions, a moral virtue that is used only when we will and thus is exclusively a cause of ordinate, consequent (not antecedent) passion (chapter 5).; In the final chapter, observing that Aquinas is silent on the consistency with which the temperate person experiences spontaneous, ordinate passions, I attempt to fill this lacuna by developing the notions of “semi-virtue” and “semi-virtuous passion,” building on Aquinas's teaching on the internal sense powers, especially the cogitative power. |
