What is the Nature of the Will? | Prof. Edward Feser
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 10 July 2019
⏱️ 76 minutes
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Summary
This was the fifth lecture of our 2019 Summer Philosophy Workshop, "Aquinas on Human Action and Virtue." The annual four day conference was cosponsored by the Catholic and Dominican Institute and the Center for Ethics and Culture. The Conference ran from June 19th-23rd at Mount Saint Mary College, Newburgh, NY. For more information about upcoming TI events, visit: www.thomisticinstitute.org/events
Speakers included:
Fr. James Brent (Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception), Fr. Steve Brock (Pontifical University of the Holy Cross), Edward Feser (Pasadena City College), Candace Vogler (University of Chicago) and Fr. Michael Sherwin (University of Fribourg)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So the connection between metaphysics and ethics is nowhere more clear or direct than where |
| 0:07.0 | questions about the nature of the will arise. |
| 0:10.0 | For it is all and only creatures with wills who can intelligibly be said to be subject to moral praise or blame. |
| 0:17.0 | And it's only by understanding the metaphysics of the will, that we can see why that is the case. |
| 0:21.6 | Moreover, there may be no area where bad metaphysics has caused greater damage to moral theory and practice than where errors about the nature of the will are concerned. |
| 0:30.6 | The most obvious and commonly cited example would be the thesis that free will is an illusion, the truth of which would undermine the |
| 0:38.1 | very possibility of morality. But Tomas would cite other examples too, albeit ones that are |
| 0:43.5 | bound to be more controversial. There is the voluntarist thesis that the intellect is subordinate to the |
| 0:48.5 | will, which Tomas take to have irrationalist implications. There is the related thesis that the |
| 0:54.0 | will's freedom consists in freedom of indifference |
| 0:56.7 | toward the various ends it might pursue rather than freedom for excellence or the freedom |
| 1:01.7 | to pursue the good, decided distinction emphasized by Surveus Pinker's. |
| 1:06.6 | And related to that error is yet another one, according to which freedom of the will |
| 1:10.2 | is incompatible with the theological truth, which, as I will argue, is also a philosophical truth, that the wills of the blessed in heaven are forever fixed on God, and the wills of the damned are forever fixed on evil, a truth, the rejection of which is bound to have dire consequences for moral theology. |
| 1:28.2 | These errors are rooted in more fundamental metaphysical errors. |
| 1:31.4 | For example, there is a tendency to hypothesize the will, to treat it as if it were something |
| 1:37.0 | like a substance in its own right rather than a power of a rational substance. |
| 1:41.6 | This tendency reflects a blindness to the unity of the human person, |
| 1:45.3 | but has followed upon modern philosophy's abandonment of the notion of substantial form. |
| 1:50.1 | Modern philosophy also abandoned the notion of natural teleology, and with it, any possibility |
| 1:54.7 | of seeing the will as naturally directed toward the good. Then there is the materialist denial |
| 2:00.5 | of the immateriality of the intellect |
... |
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