You're listening to the partially examined life.

This is still episode 378.

We're doing a third part of it, reconvening two days later from our lengthy discussion

of God to hit this stuff about free will, mind, and feelings.

So that's sections 12, 15, 16, and 17 of Timothy McDermott's Oxford's Thomas Aquinas,

selected philosophical writings, and we'll just see how much we can get done in the next hour so i know

west you want to start on free will right yeah let's do that so i think we should start with

will as rational desire okay so that's 16 so yeah Rational Desire is a three-page section.

I know this kind of connected to what we were talking about last time.

We were talking about causality in the proofs for the existence of God.

And so there was a question about how things fit together causally and how we fit together in with all that. He begins by talking about

activity in natural things. There's a very aristotelian idea that the good is what all desire,

and so we can think of, right, gravity in terms of natural desire when something, you drop something

and it falls to the ground.

But he wants to start making some distinctions here, which will allow us to make room for the

idea that we aren't simply being pushed and pulled around by desire, just like physical

objects are pushed and pulled around by gravity.

Is it too much to say that in the ancient Greek, it would actually be an analytic truth that

good is what everything desires, or is that still a substantial?

Because, I mean, it sounds like a very substantial and controversial philosophical thesis for

us, but if it is just, you know, everything aims at a target. And, you know, the Greek word

for good is something like target or something like, or aim. It's not, but it is, according to the

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