ABSTRACT
Thomas Aquinas (1224/5-1274) discusses human free will in many places in his writings, dealing with various aspects and contexts. I shall order the diverse and sometimes scattered passages under two main headings, dubbed ‘theological’ and ‘anthropological,’ and subdivide each again in two. The theological discussions about human free will center around two divine attributes: God’s foreknowledge and God’s causality. The former would imply that the whole future, including what we shall do, is now already determinate. And if God causes everything and his will cannot be thwarted, human actions would be necessary outcomes of God’s acting. The two anthropological issues deal with the dominant role Aquinas attributes in his philosophical analysis to the human intellect in relation to the will, and with the Christian doctrine that humans are enslaved to sin. I shall rst elaborate on the fourfold distinction itself and then discuss Aquinas’ views on each of these four problems.
