Free Will and the Soul | Prof. Thomas Osborne

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2022

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This lecture was given on May 28, 2022 at the 11th Annual Aquinas Philosophy Workshop on Aquinas on the Soul. The handouts for the lecture can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/42jmxp7u. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Thomas M. Osborne, Jr. (Ph.D., Duke 2001), is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy, and a member of the Center for Thomistic Studies, University of St. Thomas (Houston). He has written many articles on medieval and late-scholastic philosophy and other topics, and is the author of Love of Self and Love of God in Thirteenth-Century Ethics (2005), Human Action in Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham (2014), and Aquinas's Ethics (2020).

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.
0:03.0	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:11.0	So first, introduction, we'll just talk a bit briefly about the will and what it is.
0:23.6	And then I'll make three points, starting with not the freedom of the will,
0:27.6	but the necessity of the will, what the will has to will,
0:30.6	what it's directed towards, so that will be the first point.
0:33.6	The second section will be in how the will is moved and how the will moves.
0:40.3	And so this is the cooperation between the will and the intellect.
0:46.3	And then the third point will be on free choice.
0:51.3	How do we know about it?
0:53.3	Thomas doesn't usually appeal to our experience.
0:57.0	We don't look into ourselves and see the free will. We notice that we praise and blame others.
1:04.0	We see them as responsible for their acts. And we can also give an account of its freedom in terms of its causes.
1:11.1	The causes are indeterminate, so the choice itself is going to be indeterminate.
1:20.6	So first, the will.
1:24.4	What is it?
1:25.9	I'll talk a little bit about the will's willing, but remember, as we
1:30.3	heard yesterday, is the will a subject of action or a... no, not really, right? It's like
1:40.3	seeing. You can talk about the power of sightse seeing, and Thomas does, but that's improper.
1:47.0	You can talk about my eye seeing.
1:50.0	That's less proper.
1:51.0	It's a proper sense, but less proper.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Thomistic Institute, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Thomistic Institute and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.