Okay, well, the theme of our conference is human action and virtue.

That covers a vast, vast number of topics in St. Thomas.

So really, we're talking about the prima secundi and the secundi secundi.

What I'm going to do this morning is give you a lead-in to lay a kind of common ground for all of us,

and so those who are not deeply familiar with those texts and Aquinas can be caught up,

hopefully, enough to be able to follow the talks for the rest of the weekend,

and those of you who are familiar with it can get a review,

and then we can have some Q&A time.

OK?

All right.

So let's start out with the basic statement

that we're going to be discussing free agency today.

OK?

Now, there's lots of ways we could go with this. Do human beings have, are we free

agents? Do we have free will? There's the whole question of determinism versus free will. We'll set

that aside and we'll take it as granted that the onset question has been answered. Human

beings do in fact have free will. We'll take that for granted. I know that's a major presupposition, but you have to have some kind of presuppositions.

So we'll start with that. Now let's then begin with how do we experience our free agency?

This is important to start here, I think, in the consideration of things, because the way in which we experience our free agency,

our lived experience, so to speak, sets us up in some way for an alternative way of thinking about free agency that's rather different from Thomas Aquinas. So let's start with just an ordinary daily experience.

We're all familiar with the experience of having options before us.

You go into a restaurant, there's a menu, here's the options.

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