PHIL 759 Medieval and Contemporary Theories of Free Will
Medieval and contemporary theories of free will can be put into fruitful dialogue because the inquiries they respond to are partly the same and partly complementary to each other. Medieval thinkers debated questions like the relation between free decision (liberum arbitrium) and the good, the presupposition of free decision for moral responsibility, the relation between occurrent knowledge and free volitions and between ignorance and evildoing, and the compatibility of free will with certain forms of necessity and with divine foreknowledge. Our own contemporary debates center on the relation between the ability to do otherwise and moral responsibility and on the compatibility of free will with determinism and with indeterminism. We will begin with key issues in recent literature, which tends to be closer to our own philosophical sensibilities, and then study seminal medieval texts. We will thus read medieval theories with the critical eye sharpened by the contemporary discussions and see how medieval and contemporary theories can enrich each other.