Abstract

This dissertation deals with one of the most subtle and comprehensive philosophical accounts regarding the nature and operations of the human will; that developed Francisco Suarez during the pre-cartesian period. ;Suarez did offer a subtle account of will both with regard to the articulation of the issue and the conception of will itself. Suarez, unlike his predecessors, structures his views on will in texts on metaphysics and psychology; only the issues about the freedom of the will are treated in his theology. ;Suarez's articulation of the topic allows scholars to clearly distinguish between the meta-psychological issues about the will and the typical theological concerns that Scholastics attached to will. ;We observe that contemporary philosophical tendencies demand not a division but some sort of unification for the topic. So we reconstructed analytically in a unified manner Suarez's metaphysical, psychological and theological accounts of will. The elements included in each account are still gathered together by two grounding questions: what is the will? and how does it function? ;We base our reconstruction directly on Suarez's own subtle conception of will itself. He holds a two-fold yet integrated conception of will, for he offers a metaphysical account and a psychological account. The reason is that for Suarez the will plays two roles: one related to the proximate efficient principle that will is--as such, it efficaciously produces the most perfect human act, the free-act; the other role related to the will's nature as a vital appetitive faculty of the soul--as such it is willing for unpossessed goods. ;To grasp the vital nature of will, we provide the preliminary framework of Suarez's philosophical general psychology. Our main source of analysis and discussions is Suarez's treatise De Anima , which--to my knowledge--has never been discussed extensively in any published philosophical paper. ;We stress that Suarez's meta-psychological writings on soul and will constitute his initial settings for his theology of will and freedom. It is only with this fundamental framework that we could assess Suarez's paradigmatic indeterministic view on freedom and associated issue of reconciliation