Passions in William Ockham’s Philosophical Psychology

1. 1. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS At the end ofthe 19th century, when the discipline called psychology 1 is said to have become "independent" , attention began to be focused towards nominalistic philosophy from a point of view that can be called psychological. At that time, Vienna, the capital of the Austro­ Hungarian Dual Monarchy, was a center for several disciplines. It is no wonder that it was there that the research conceming the psychological themes of William Ockham and other nominalists began. Karl Wemer (1821-1888), a Catholic, neo-scholastic scholar, professor of New Testament studies at the Univers?ty of Vienna (1870), and a member ofthe Imperial Academy of Sciences (1874), seems to have planned a history of medieval psychology. However, only fragments of it were printed, among them the following articles: 'Der A verroismus in der christlich-peripatetischen Psychologie des sp?teren Mittelalters' (1881), 'Die nominalisirende Psychologie der Scholastik des sp?teren Mittelalters' (1881) and 'Die augustinische Psychologie in ihrer mittelalterlich-scholastischen Einkleidung und Gestaltung' (1882). 2 Wemer deals especially with Ockham's 1 See Kusch 1995 and 1999. 2 Pluta 1987, 12-13. See Wemer 1881a, 1881b, 1882. (Those three texts were republished in 1964 under the name Psychologie des Mittelalters. ) Prior to those books, Wemer had written about William of Auvergne's, Bonaventure's, John Duns Scotus's and Roger 1 2 CHAPTERONE psychology, among other things, in the second of these articles.