ABSTRACT
This chapter considers both scholastic and humanist authors and shows how the passions are related to moral action. It traces the way in which these scholastic and Renaissance thinkers shift and in some ways weaken the link between the passions and virtue/morality as it was conceived by ancient and medieval thinkers. Even though earlier thinkers in the Christian tradition – Augustine, Abelard, Aquinas – distinguish between passion and the will, Medieval Aristotelianism retains the notion that a fully virtuous act is one in which being virtuous means wanting to act virtuously rather than willing against or transcending passion. Ockham uses this physiological view of the passions, the view that the passions are merely bodily effects, to sidestep two different elements of Aristotle's ethics: first, that we have a "natural inclination" toward the good, and, second, that this good is defined by our nature as human beings.
