This essay reads Hobbes’ account of human action against Aristotle’s accounts of animal motion and human action, thus offering a new perspective for understanding Hobbes’ account and illuminating a neglected aspect of Hobbes’ relationship to Aristotle. I argue that the basic structure of Hobbes’ account is indebted to Aristotle’s account of animal motion, except that Hobbes purges the teleological elements from his predecessor and presents a picture that is mechanistic and explicitly deterministic. Moreover, while Aristotle introduces ‘deliberation’ as a way (...) of explaining the diversity of human actions as their varied attempts at realizing the distinctly human end of the good life, Hobbes’ radically anti-Aristotelian notion of ‘deliberation’ explains that diversity in terms of the fundamental uncertainty of the passions. I conclude with some reflections on two related tensions in Hobbes: between Hobbes’ determinism and his account of human action, and between his ethical project of reducing human life to mere life and his separate ethical project of justifying diverse ways of life. This essay contributes to our understanding of the significance of Hobbes’ account of human action in both the history of the debate on determinism and the history of ethics. (shrink)

: Two common ways of explaining akrasia will be presented, one which focuses on strength of desire and the other which focuses on action issuing from practical judgment. Though each is intuitive in a certain way, they both fail as explanations of the most interesting cases of akrasia. Spinoza 's own thoughts on bondage and the affects follow, from which a Spinozist explanation of akrasia is constructed. This account is based in Spinoza 's mechanistic psychology of cognitive affects. Because Spinoza (...) 's account explains action asissuing from modes of mind that are both cognitive and affective, it captures the intuitions that motivate the two traditional views while avoiding the pitfalls that result from their one‐sided approaches. This project will allow us a fuller understanding of Spinozist moral psychology. In addition to this historical value, the Spinozist theory may offer a satisfactory explanation of certain hard cases of akrasia while avoiding the problems be set by other theories. For this reason, the Spinozist account could also be seen as a useful contribution to our philosophical understanding of the phenomenon of akrasia. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Indifference is a term often used to describe the sort of freedom had by the will according to the libertarian, or Molinist account. It is thought to be a univocal term. In fact, however, it is used in at least seven different ways, in a variety of domains during the early modern period. All of them have plausible roots in Descartes, but he himself uses the term in only one sense, and failure to notice this consistent use by him (...) has bedeviled interpretations of his account of the will. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore René Descartes' conception of human freedom. I begin with the key interpretive challenges of Descartes' remarks and then turn to two foundational issues in the secondary literature: the philosophical backdrop of Descartes' remarks and the notions of freedom that commentators have used to characterize Descartes. The remainder of the paper is focused on the main current debate: Descartes' position on the relationship between freedom and determinism.