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194. - Will

from W

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2025

By
Matthew J. Kisner
Edited by
Karolina Hübner  and
Justin Steinberg
Karolina Hübner
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
Justin Steinberg
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
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Summary

In seventeenth-century philosophy, the term “will” (voluntas) generally referred to the power or faculty of the mind that produces volitions. As such, the will was conceived as the executive power responsible for actions and for the sort of control that one exercises in choices and decisions. Philosophical accounts of the will were particularly interested in whether and in what sense the will qualifies as free.

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Chapter
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The Cambridge Spinoza Lexicon , pp. 571 - 573
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Recommended Reading

Della Rocca, M. (2003). The power of an idea: Spinoza’s critique of pure will. Noûs, 37(2), 200–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kisner, M. (2021). Spinoza’s guise of the good: Getting to the bottom of 3p9s. Philosophical Explorations, 24, 34–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rutherford, D. (2020). Deciding what to do: The relation of affect and reason in Spinoza’s Ethics. In Naamen-Zauderer, N. (ed.), Freedom, Action, and Motivation in Spinoza’s Ethics (pp. 133–51). Routledge.Google Scholar
Steinberg, J. (2018). Two puzzles concerning Spinoza’s conception of belief. European Journal of Philosophy, 26(1), 261–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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