ABSTRACT
Question eighty-three, like question eighty-two, is devoted to the question of whether human beings are free. But the question is discussed with a different repertoire of concepts. In English it is natural to phrase the question of human freedom in the terms: do human beings have free will? But there is no expression in Aquinas’ Latin which corresponds exactly to the English ‘free will’. Aquinas speaks of the will (voluntas); that is the intellectual appetite which was the subject of question eighty-two. But he does not customarily speak of free will (libera voluntas) or of the freedom of the will (libertas voluntatis). The noun which goes with the Latin word for ‘free’ is not ‘will’ but ‘decision’ (arbitrium). It is to the topic of free decision, liberum arbitrium, that question eighty-three is devoted.
