This essay explores the metaphysical foundations of Spinoza's psychology. A particular focus is Spinoza's conatus principle according to which each thing strives not only to persevere in existence but also to increase its power of acting. This striving is, for Spinoza, the actual essence of each thing, and it forms the basis of the three fundamental affects desire, joy, and sadness--which are central to Spinoza's accounts of weakness of the will, self-deception, the imitation of the affects, egoism, altruism, and teleology. Throughout, the essay emphasizes the ways in which Spinoza's psychology manifests his naturalism, his view that everything –including human beings and their various affects or emotions – is governed by the same laws that are found throughout nature.

Having examined the judgment crucial to the hylomorphically structured act of choice, this chapter turns to the act of choice itself, which is a volition. It does not yet offer an account of choice’s hylomorphic structure but lays important groundwork for doing so in Chapter 5 by shedding light on Aquinas’s general account of volition and its dependence on judgment. It first argues that a volition differs from judgment because it involves a world-to-mind rather than mind-to-world direction of fit. It then examines how volition depends on judgment. Aquinas himself characterizes judgment as the formal as well as the final cause of volition. The chapter suggests that these are two descriptions of one and the same dependence relation: judgment orders volition to an end, which makes it a final cause, and in so doing it also determines the volition’s kind, which makes it a formal cause. The last two sections deal with Aquinas’s view that the will “moves itself.” They argue that this does not imply any freedom of the will to operate independently of reason. In short, the chapter advocates a strongly intellectualist account of the will’s freedom.

Chapter 1 explains the institutional background to the phenomenon of ‘left-behind’ children in rural China, how these children are represented in the media and scholarly literature, and my unique approach to exploring their lives. Firstly, I focus on the influence of rural-urban migration on family relationships rather than on quantifying the impacts of parents’ migration on different dimensions of the children’s wellbeing, as many previous studies have done. Secondly, I see parental migration as oriented towards educational investment, thereby identifying ‘study’ as central to how the children interpret their parents’ migration and their own obligations to their families. This approach extends extant analyses of children’s experiences of family ‘cultural capital’ accumulation strategies from families where parents and children co-reside to families where parental migration is pivotal to the child raising strategy. Thirdly, I argue that left-behind children are actors in spatially dispersed or multi-local parent-child striving teams rather than the passive recipients of adults’ decisions and migration’s various impacts. I thereby prioritise the children’s perspectives rather than adults’ viewpoints, exploring variation among the children by their gender, age, and academic performance, and by their family’s gendered and generational configurations and class, situated within a wider cultural, institutional and economic context.