In this paper, I explore René Descartes' conception of human freedom. I begin with the key interpretive challenges of Descartes' remarks and then turn to two foundational issues in the secondary literature: the philosophical backdrop of Descartes' remarks and the notions of freedom that commentators have used to characterize Descartes. The remainder of the paper is focused on the main current debate: Descartes' position on the relationship between freedom and determinism.

in this paper i develop a new account of the philosophical motivations for Descartes's theory of judgment. The theory needs explanation because the idea that judgment, or belief, is an operation of the will seems problematic at best, and Descartes does not make clear why he adopted what, at the time, was a novel view. i argue that attending to Descartes's conception of the will as the active, free faculty of mind reveals that a general concern with responsibility motivates his theory of judgment. My account avoids some unappealing features of the standard interpretation, renders the theory more plausible than many have suggested, and explains why his theory does not fall neatly into any current-day position on the issue of the control we have over belief.

Descartes claims that the passions of the soul are "all in their nature good" even though they exaggerate the value of their objects, have the potential to deceive us, and often mislead us. What, then, can he mean by this? In this paper, I argue that these effects of the passions are only problematic when we incorrectly take their goodness to consist in their informing us of harms and benefits to the mind-body composite. I maintain, instead, that the passions are good in their motivational function, which they carry out by representing objects and situations as having various properties and thereby appearing to be "reasons of goodness." Further, I argue that the main way in which the passions are problematic is merely an occasional physiological byproduct of a well-functioning system. I show, therefore, that the passions' motivational function, representationality, and accompanying physiology are all significant and interrelated aspects of their goodness.

This chapter investigates Descartes’s conception of the imago Dei, that it is above all in virtue of the will that human beings bear the image and likeness of God. The chapter begins by illuminating his understanding of the doctrine—how he conceives of the relation between human beings and God. It is argued that Descartes is alluding not to Scholastic conceptions of analogy but instead to the Augustinian–Thomistic tradition on the nature of image. Turning to Descartes’s conception of the likeness between the human will and God’s will, the chapter argues that he thinks the likeness is that both are infinite in ‘extent’. This means that human will can ‘extend itself’ to things that can be the object of God’s will, notable because Descartes famously thinks that absolutely anything can be the object of God’s will. An explanation is offered for why this interpretation is not implausible, contrary to first appearances.