The invention of the modern subject (continued) : will and action (4)

The second hour was devoted to Locke and Chisholm. From the former we examined the distinction between thinking and moving: the two kinds of action distinguished in theEssay. We then looked at the distinction between the power to act and the power to postpone, 'Will' and 'Forbear'; the difference between restraint and cohibition - one of the neologisms coined by Locke's translator, Pierre Coste (1668-1747), to render ' restraint ' by a noun, on the model of the Latin cohibitio; then the Lockean demonstration that freedom does not belong to the will, but to man, the thrust of which is that, freedom being a power, it cannot be an attribute of the will, which is itself a power. Finally, the significance and scope of the thesis that "powers are relations, not agents" was underlined. Turning to Chisholm, we examined his reworking of the three Lockean questions raised at the end of the first hour. We then went into the detail of his argumentation and his use of two medieval distinctions: between actus imperatus and actus elicitus; between transitive and immanent action. We analyzed their causal recovery in the form of a distinction between transitive causation : 'transeunt causation' (between two events) and immanent causation: 'Immanent causation' (between an agent and an event), emphasizing that, for Chisholm, the problem of human freedom is that of the status of the elicit act. After recalling two of Thomas Aquinas's theses on constraint and sin, we focused on the formula: "Every man is an unmoved first mover. " Chisholm's position on the predictability of human actions was then evoked through his analysis of the Kant-Hobbes dispute, and we arrived at the Leibniz formula on which the author of Human Freedom and the Self builds the final formulation of his thesis: our desires "incline without necessitating".