ABSTRACT
To begin with, most contemporary discussions of free will tend to belong to what is in fact a non-Thomistic tradition of thought about the topic.1 In this tradition, human freedom ultimately is or depends on a property of just one component of human mental faculties, the will; and freedom most fundamentally consists in the will’s ability to act autonomously in general and independently of the intellect in particular. This tradition has such a grip on the contemporary discussion, both for libertarians2 and for their opponents, that Aquinas’s account tends to be interpreted by its lights. As a result, the lineaments of the theory Aquinas holds are obscured. For Aquinas, as we will see, freedom with regard to willing is a property primarily of a human being, not of some particular component of a human being. Furthermore, the will is not independent of the intellect. On the contrary, the dynamic interactions of intellect and will yield freedom as an emergent property or a systems-level feature.3
