Escoto es uno de los pensadores medievales que con más fuerza afirmó la especificidad de lo libre en las potencias del alma, distinguiéndolo netamente de lo natural. Llevó su postura hasta ciertas conclusiones que parecieron demasiado atrevidas, incluso para autores intelectualmente muy cercanos. Por eso, se le ha presentado a veces como un precedente de la visión moderna de la libertad como autonomía absoluta. Este artículo se acerca a su pensamiento, repasando tres aspectos de su propuesta que permiten ofrecer una (...) visión más completa de su idea de libertad: la relación entre objeto conocido y acto de la voluntad, la doctrina de las _affectiones _de la voluntad y la consideración de la plenitud de la voluntad en la _beatitudo_. Se repasan varios debates actuales sobre el pensamiento de Escoto, con el objetivo de extraer algunos elementos que puedan servir para una exposición sistemática de la cuestión. (shrink)

Later medieval theories of free choice differ fundamentally as to the importance they assign to deliberation. Some thinkers hold that the will's choices necessarily agree with the intellect's judgment, obtained by deliberation, of what is most worth choosing in a particular circumstance. They thus think that deliberation provides the object of choice. In addition, they take the control that is essential to free choice to be rooted in deliberation. Others object that deliberation cannot ground free choice since it is itself (...) not originally in our control. They think that one can choose differently from what appears most choiceworthy upon deliberation, and so they deny that the object of choice is exclusively given by deliberation. This paper considers theories of the role of deliberation in free choice held by prominent thirteenth and early fourteenth-century thinkers. It will be shown that there are significant theoretical difficulties on both sides. (shrink)

For Duns Scotus, facts about moral psychology are ultimately reducible to facts about ontology. The created agent has a soul which includes as formal “parts” the intellect and will; the intellect and will, of course, are the seat of qualities (e.g. thoughts and volitions, respectively) and habits (e.g. virtues) that are related to one another in various ways. One of these ways is the conformity relation. From a metaphysical base of categorical being – whether Substance, Quality/Habit, or Relation – Scotus (...) constructs an ethical theory which complements, though in some interesting ways departs from, the Aristotelian tradition of which he is a part. In this essay, our aim is twofold: first, to reconstruct the ontological status of virtue within Scotus's overall metaphysical framework. Second, we attend to the ways in which this metaphysic of virtue places constraints on how one is to understand the conformity relation that, according to Scotus, must exist between an agent's will and right reason whenever a morally good action results. (shrink)