![]() ![]() ![]() As Osborne astutely observes, the complexity of this history means that the standard categories of "intellectualism" and "voluntarism" prove to be of limited use in organizing these debates conceptually and historically.Ĭhapter 2, "Practical Reason," discusses both the nature of practical reasoning and its role in producing action. For Aquinas, by contrast, freedom is rooted in the intellect's capacity to judge different particular goods as means to (or ways of realizing) happiness and to judge one and the same good in different ways. Scotus (sometimes) and Ockham (always) ascribe some efficient causality to the intellect, though for both of them the will must be the more important efficient cause, because freedom is rooted in the will's capacity for opposites. To put those claims in Scholastic vocabulary, the will is the efficient cause and the intellect the formal cause of an action. For Aquinas, it is the will that actually brings about a human action the intellect, by presenting an object in a particular way, accounts for the content of the act, its being one sort of act rather than another. Osborne Jr.'s credit that he attempted this ambitious task, and that he has largely succeeded in what he set out to do.Ĭhapter 1, "Causes of the Act," examines the three thinkers' accounts of the causal contributions of will and intellect to human actions as well as their understanding of what grounds or accounts for freedom in human action. Looking at not just one, but three great thinkers of the period brings further difficulties: taking account of the vast and contentious scholarly literature on Thomas Aquinas, grappling with the disarray in which Scotus's texts have come down to us, and making something out of Ockham's relatively brief treatments of most of the principal questions. Covering the topic of human action in high medieval philosophy requires one to discuss a great variety of issues: mental causation, the powers of the soul and their interrelationship, the nature of freedom and moral responsibility, how practical reason guides action, and what makes actions good or bad. ![]()
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