The rational faculties of intellect and will were at the heart of many important issues in the Middle Ages, including the relationship between deliberation and free choice, the explanation of intentional action, and the movement of the body by the rational soul. In the contributions that follow, Tobias Hofffmann, Sonja Schierbaum, and Can Laurens Löwe address these issues, respectively. In addition to clarifying various aspects of later medieval psychology, Hoffmann, Schierbaum, and Löwe each demonstrate the continuity between contemporary philosophy and the philosophy of the later Middle Ages.
Thomas Aquinas famously draws a distinction between a potency in the will to the specification of its act and a potency in the will to the exercise of its act. He also thinks that the will is moved to the specification of its act by the good apprehended by reason and to the exercise of its act by itself. Although Aquinas’s distinction has many attractive features, his explanation of how the will moves itself to the exercise of its act (namely, by moving reason) is not adequate; it does not really explain how the will’s potency to the exercise of its act is actualized. I argue that, by distinguishing between three modes of self-motion, effective, accidental, and consecutive, and two types of potency, essential and accidental, the early Oxford Thomist Thomas of Sutton (ca. 1250–1315) presents a plausible development of Aquinas’s distinction that addresses this problem; the will, by willing some end, actualizes its accidental potency to willing some means to that end, thereby moving itself consecutively. Although I think that Sutton does give us the means to clear up some of the confusion surrounding Aquinas’s view on the will, I also motivate some doubts about whether he really succeeds in preserving what makes Aquinas’s distinction so attractive in the first place.
Godfrey of Fontaines, a medieval compatibilist about freedom and determinism, faces a challenge. His compatibilism seems to have the consequence that no exterior act, like giving someone a gift or stealing a neighbor's pears, is imputable to a human agent such that she can be praised or blamed for doing it. I explain how Godfrey responds to this challenge by arguing that a human being has power over the interior acts of apprehending and appetition from which every exterior act proceeds. I also draw attention to the intentionality of interior acts to make sense of how the apprehending and appetitive potencies of human beings are really the subjects of apprehending and appetition, respectively.
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