Psicología Tomista y Las Pasiones | Martín Echavarría

·1 hr 32 min·5 clips

A 13th-century theologian's theory of passions directly challenges how modern psychology understands emotions today.

Martín Echavarría begins by framing the study of Thomas Aquinas's psychology as relevant to contemporary psychology and our emotive world. He clarifies that Aquinas's term 'passions' corresponds to what we now call emotions, like love, hatred, joy, and anger. Aquinas's conception is rooted in Aristotelian philosophy, where passions are movements of the sensitive appetite, activated by a preceding sensory cognition via the estimative or cogitative faculty. These passions are psychosomatic, involving both a tendency (formal aspect) and a physical alteration, such as the boiling of blood in anger. Aquinas classified eleven basic passions, distinguishing between concupiscible (desiring pleasant goods) and irascible (pursuing difficult goods) appetites. The lecture then examines the historical turn with Descartes, who, through dualism and mechanism, redefined emotions as feelings—cognitive phenomena about bodily states—losing the tendential dimension. This Cartesian influence permeated empiricism and reached figures like William James, who argued emotion is the sensation of visceral changes. Echavarría then introduces Magda Arnold, a 20th-century experimental psychologist whose theory, detailed in her 1960s work 'Emotion and Personality,' reactivates Aquinas's framework. Arnold posits emotions are activated by sensory-intuitive judgments (akin to Aquinas's estimative), classifies them similarly into impulsive and struggle emotions, and views them as psychosomatic. The talk briefly addresses Freud, noting his mechanistic, non-teleological drive theory and its philosophical roots in materialism and Nietzsche. Finally, Echavarría comments on the current state of psychology, noting diversity but a lack of deep theorization, with trends like positive psychology attempting empirical study of classical ethical concepts.

As heard by us

A clear Thomistic discussion of passions, education, Descartes, and the limits of empirical virtue research.

The episode centers the passions within a Thomistic account of human psychology, treating feeling as neither directly obedient to the will nor as raw material for reason to manage from above.

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