First Movements, Emotions and Free Choice

There is a long Western tradition of discussing ‘first movements’ in the context of emotions, often from the point of view of voluntariness and moral accountability. In the first section, I describe the origins of the doctrine of the spontaneous acts of the affective part of the soul in ancient philosophy and its development in early medieval thought. I then explore how the first movements were dealt with in the different theories of the passions and the will in Aquinas’s Aristotelian psychology and the voluntarist view of John Duns Scotus. In the last section, I discuss the spontaneous emotional movements in the psychology of Descartes and Leibniz, two eminent representatives of early modern thought.