Conference | Paper

According to William Ockham’s (1288–ca 1347) Aristotelian view, the will, as
rational appetite, is a power of the intellectual soul. There are two kinds of passions that can be attributed to the will. On the one hand, passions are proper acts of the will, such as desire (desiderium) and avoidance (fuga); on the other hand, passions are caused by acts of will, without being acts themselves, such as pleasure (dilectio) and distress (tristitia). My aim in this talk is to show that for Ockham, there is more to the will than desire and pleasure (and their negative counterparts), namely love. Desire has a motivational function by virtue of which it is possible to determine the central role of the will for action, whereas pleasure can be conceived as an affective reaction to – the fulfilment of – one’s desires. Love is irreducible to both. In order to show this, I will analyze the intentional structure of all three kinds of passions of will (that is, desire, pleasure, and love). Although each of them presupposes cognition in one way or another, they do so in different ways affecting also their intentional structure. In the end, it should become clear that love is fundamental insofar as it grounds any other way of willing. Thus, by presenting Ockham’s account as a case study of medieval conceptions of the passions of the will, it should become clear that the conception of the intentional structure of passions is essential to theories of motivation and action.