71 VOLUNTARINESS, CHOICE, AND WILL TOBIAS HOFFMANN Voluntariness, Choice, and Will in the Ethics Commentaries of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas * When Aristotle’s account of voluntariness ( eJkouvsion) and decision (proaivresi") became accessible to medieval Latin thinkers, it merged with an existing tradition of inquiry that centered on the notions of liberum arbitrium (free decision) and voluntas (will) 1 . Although the conceptual content of these notions may not be foreign to Aristotle’s thought, their semantic fields are not matched by any word employed by the Stagirite 2 . The medieval translators used ‘voluntas’ to render Aristotle’s notion of wish (bouvlhsi"), but whereas Aristotle used this term exclusively to denote the desire for an end (as opposed to the means), the medieval commentators attributed to voluntas the same range of meaning that this word had acquired by their time. Most importantly, the scholastic thinkers understood the will as a power that is distinct from reason. For the scholastics, the will is that by which the person has control of the soul’s rational functions and its passions, and it is that to which moral failure is imputed. Even those medieval thinkers who follow closely Aristotle’s account of rational agency integrate the will in their action theory in ways that Aristotle did not. * Research for this paper has been conducted at the University of Notre Dame under the sponsorship of the Erasmus Institute and the Center for Ethics and Culture. I wish to thank Henryk Anzulewicz for providing me with the forthcoming edition of Albert’s De homine and with copies of the manuscripts used in this article, and Joe McCoy for helpful comments. 1 The most comprehensive study of the doctrinal developments regarding liberum arbitrium and voluntas in the High Middle Ages still is O. LOTTIN, Libre arbitre et liberté depuis saint Anselme jusqu’à la fin du XIIIe siècle, in Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, 2e éd., J. Duculot, Gambloux 1957, pp. 11-389. How stoicism and Christian theology contributed to the understanding of the notion of will in scholasticism is concisely described by R. A. GAUTHIER, L’Éthique à Nicomaque, tome I, 1, Introduction, 2e éd., Publications universitaires - Béatrice-Nauwelaerts, Leuven-Paris 1970, (reprint : Éditions Peeters, Louvain-la-Neuve - Paris - Sterling, Va. 2002), pp. 244-266. 2 The concept of will can be considered to be implicit in Aristotle’s writings, see M. M. WALSH, Aristotle’s Conception of Freedom, « Journal of the History of Philosophy », 35, 1997, pp. 496-507 ; T. H. IRWIN, Who Discovered the Will ?, « Philosophical Perspectives », 6, 1992, pp. 453-473. For a succinct overview of different ways in which the concept of will is prefigured in antique and late antique philosophy and for references to secondary literature, see R. SORABJI, The Concept of the Will from Plato to Maximus the Confessor, in The Will and Human Action : From Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. T. PINK, M. W. F. STONE, Routledge, London 2004, pp. 6-28. See also A. DIHLE, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, University of California Press, Berkeley 1982 ; C. HORN, Augustinus und die Entstehung des philosophischen Willensbegriffs, « Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung », 50, 1996, pp. 113-132.