MAREK GENSLER, Walter Burley on Voluntary and Involuntary Motion in Man

SUMMARY

Walter Burley, an English philosopher active in the first half of the fourteenth century, composed a set of commentaries on Aristotle’s small treatises on psychology and physiology. One of the issues raised in three of them is the problem of voluntary and involuntary motion in humans. Drawing from several earlier commentators of Aristotle, Burley analyses the nature of motion in animals and the specificity of human motion. He tries to explain the animal motion with the help of the concept of spiritus, both in the “regular” cases and in the exceptional ones. He identifies the position of practical intellect in the account of voluntary motion in humans.