A Appetite, Renaissance Idea of Doina-Cristina Rusu Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands Abstract For Aristotle, the sensitive soul of animals was distinguished from the vegetative one because of its appetitive faculty. During Renaissance, the concept of appetite started to be applied not only to animal and human soul but to nature in general. For several authors, nature was not conceived as a passive chunk receiving exter- nal forms and blindly following some pre- established ends. Quite the contrary, it was a “sentient” body, intentionally acting with the purpose of satisfying its appetites. The idea of an appetitive matter is associated with vitalism, panpsychism (or pansentism), and sometimes even animism. Synonyms Desire; Inclination; Tendency Heritage and Rupture with Tradition For Aristotle, animals and humans possess a sen- sitive soul responsible for emotions and desires. Its appetitive faculty is both irrational (in the case of animals) and rational (in the case of humans). This capacity of humans to control their desires and appetites in accordance with their reason is called moral virtue. Aristotle’ s scheme of the souls was the model for medieval authors, who emphasized the moral virtue relative to the appe- titive faculty as specific to humans and their free will. During the Renaissance, appetite becomes a more central concept, as it is associated not only with the sensitive soul of animals and humans but with matter in general. Appetites explain the way in which nature operates, given that they are the source of sympathy and antipathy between bod- ies, and of attraction and repulsion; shortly, they are the sources of activity in matter. Innovative and Original Aspects Within the Aristotelian framework, Franciscus Toletus, for example, distinguishes between natu- ral, sensitive, and intellectual appetite. The intel- lectual appetite is the desire for knowledge, the sensitive resembles Aristotle’ s appetitive faculty, while the natural are the inclinations or tendencies of things to recognize their ends, that is the good God established for them. This is based on the fact that matter is appetitive, namely it has the inclina- tion to receive forms (Des Chene 1996). If this Aristotelico-Scholastic framework mat- ter remains passive, within the new vital concep- tion, however, matter is conceived as having © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Sgarbi (ed.), Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy , https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_891-1