ABSTRACT
There remains significant scholarly disagreement about Descartes’s conception of freedom. This disagreement is rooted in Descartes’s apparently inconsistent remarks on the subject: in some passages, he seems to endorse a voluntarist account of freedom, while in others he seems to define freedom in intellectualist terms. In this chapter, Ariane Cäcilie Schneck discusses these voluntarist and intellectualist strains of Descartes’s conception of freedom. Schneck considers Descartes’s theory of judgement as presented prominently in the Fourth Meditation, but also highlights his approach to freedom in his later, more ethically oriented writings such as The Passions of the Soul. Schneck argues that taking this more comprehensive approach makes it possible to reconcile the existing, mutually exclusive interpretations of Descartes’s account of freedom. Descartes’s view thus emerges as a conception of human freedom that successfully incorporates both intellectualist and voluntarist elements.
