ABSTRACTS OF OTHER PAPERS

In “Locke on the Locke Room” I examine Locke’s claims that the man’s stay in the locked room and the paralytic’s sitting still are voluntary. I argue, contrary to the views of Gideon Yaffe, that Locke does not think that voluntariness requires an exertion on the part of agent to produce a given effect. Instead Locke follows Aquinas in maintaining that things we undergo can also count as voluntary provided we prefer them to their alternatives. I also argue against Yaffe’s assimilation of Locke to the views of Susan Wolf by his claims that Locke thinks having our volitions determined by the good is constitutive of liberty and that Locke thinks moral praiseworthiness is consistent with an inability to have chosen otherwise. Instead I again argue that Locke’s views are more similar to those of Aquinas, who holds that being determined by the good in general does not entail being determined by any particular good.

In "Aquinas on Threats and Temptations" I explore Aquinas's discussion of the effects of fear and concupiscence on the voluntariness of our behavior. Aquinas maintains that when we succumb to temptation our actions are wholly voluntary. When we give up a good in the face of a threat our actions are partly involuntary, but they are more voluntary than involuntary. I argue that when we succumb to temptation our actions can also be partly involuntary. I also defend my intuition that in some mixed cases our action is more involuntary than voluntary, and I show how Aquinas's psychological theory can explain this. Finally, I explain why it matters that actions fully in accordance with our reasons responsive choices might not be fully voluntary.

In "Thomas Reid's Notion of Exertion" I show how Reid uses the notion of exertion in various ways that have not been distinguished in the secondary literature. Sometimes he uses it to refer to the exercise of a power, sometimes to the turning on or activitating of a power, and still other times to the attempt to activate a power. Getting clear on Reid's different uses of the term 'exertion' is essential to understanding his account of the sequence of events in human action. It is also helpful in defending Reid against the objection that his account of action is subject to an infinite regress.

In "Plato on Appetitive Desires in the Republic" I argue, contrary to the standard interpretation, that in rejecting the view that thirst is the desire for good drink, Plato is not rejecting the view that all desires, including appetitive desires,involve viewing their object as good. His point is that the good thing that is the object of thirst is drink, not good drink.

In "The Being of Leibnizian Phenomena," I explore questions of unity and being as they pertain to Leibniz's account of body. Robert M. Adams has argued that Leibniz's two conceptions of body as mere phenomena and as aggregates of substances are consistent and belong to a single phenomenalistic theory. I respond that Adams's strategy of understanding bodies to be intentional objects of perceptions - to be the objective reality of ideas in the Cartesian sense - is in fact inconsistent with taking them to be aggregates of substances. I agree with Adams that Leibniz thinks that aggregates of substances have their unity only in the mind, but I deny that the being of aggregates of substances is only in the mind.

In "Freedom and Strength of Will: Descartes and Albritton" and "Responses to Chappell and Watson" I compare Descartes's account of the relation between freedom of will and strength of will with that of a modern day defender of the Cartesian view that the will is so free in its nature that it cannot be constrained. Rogers Albritton argued on conceptual grounds that weakness of will is no barrier to freedom of will. Descartes, however, sometimes suggests that one must take certain practical steps to insure freedom of will. To understand this disagreement, I distinguish two different notions of strength of will. Our will is strong on the output side if we succeed in implementing our choices in the face of opposition. Our will is strong on the input side if we resist external forces in making choices. Descartes offers several different metaphors to explain the relation of the passions to a weak will, but he sometimes suggests that if our will is weak on the input side - that is, if our choices are incited by our present passions rather than our firm and decisive judgments concerning good and evil - and if we cannot control which passions we have, then we are not free, because what we what propose to do is not really up to us. Albritton, I argue, holds that the will is always indifferent - all the conditions for choosing X having been posited, we can either choose X or not — which implies that even a weak will is always free. But the price of this account of freedom, I claim, is that it cannot be explained why we choose one thing rather than another. Descartes's own account of free will is objectionable primarily because it involves the identification of the self with reason. But his account of strength of will is very similar to Gary Watson's account of freedom, because what a Cartesian strong soul chooses to do reflects its evaluational system.

In "Freedom and Weakness of Will" I revisit Rogers Albritton's attempt to defend absolute freedom of will by arguing that apparent cases of diminished freedom when we act out of passion or desire are cases of weakness of will. What is intriguing about Albritton’s view is that he thought when we act out of desire we are making choices, yet our desires are not functioning as reasons for those choices. So our desires must be influencing our choices in some other unspecified way that does not diminish our freedom. I challenge the coherence of this position. My strategy is to examine the views of leading theorists of the will – Descartes, Aquinas and Reid – to argue that the only clear way in which passions can influence our choices so that we can accurately be described as weak-willed and yet nevertheless free is that our passions influence our choices by providing reasons for them.

In "St. Thomas Aquinas on the Halfway State of Sensible Being," I examine Aquinas's account of the distinction between the corporeal and the incorporeal, especially as it pertains to sense perception. I argue, against Sheldon Cohen's attempt to read Aquinas as providing a physicalistic account of sensation, that Aquinas thinks that corporeity and incorporeity, both of activities and of forms, come in degrees, so that some activities and forms are partly corporeal and partly incorporeal. Thus, for example, he holds that the activity of digestion is a partly incorporeal activity that involves a wholly corporeal change taking place in a corporeal organ, whereas sensation (or at least the immaterial reception of a sensible form) is a partly incorporeal activity involving a wholly incorporeal change that takes place in a corporeal organ. Although this paper is focused primarily on the interpretation of Aquinas's texts, it should be of interest to those philosophers following the dispute between Myles Burnyeat and Richard Sorabji whether Aquinas's interpretation of Aristotle's account of sensation is more accurate than contemporary functionalist interpretations of Aristotle. More generally, philosophers concerned with understanding what philosophical choices underlie our modern conceptions of what it is to be mental and what it is to be physical, conceptions that in my judgment are fundamentally Cartesian, might gain some insight by comparing them with Aquinas's account of the distinction between the physical and the non-physical, as it is manifested in his account of sensations and other psychic phenomena.

In "Three Dualist Theories of the Passions," I discuss in a preliminary way the theories of Descartes, Spinoza, and Malebranche. I examine their accounts of the nature and origin of the passions of the soul, their accounts of how the passions influence our behavior, and their methods of controlling the passions.