A Study Of Thomas Aquinas’s Thought Of Free Will

Since ancient Greece,the issue of free will has been one of the focal points of debate in western philosophy.As the most famous scholastic philosopher in the Middle Ages,Thomas Aquinas’ thought of free will occupies an important position in his philosophy and theology system.Due to the profound influence of the ideological background of his time,his philosophy can be said to be the crystallization of the impact of many schools,such as Aristotle,Neo-Platonism,Augustinism and Boethius,all laid a solid foundation for the establishment of his huge and unique philosophy system.Thomas Aquinas,following the trend of The Times,reinterpreted and interpreted a series of existing Christian dogmas and made them fully fit with his philosophical theories.Among them,the study on free will emerged at the historic moment.Thomas Aquinas’theology and philosophy as the core content of the formation of Thomism in his famous masterpiece "The Complete Theology" is vividly shown.His thought of free will not only highlights theological essence due to the discussion of the relationship between freedom and grace,but also shows important theoretical significance for the development of ethical thought.On the issue of free will,Thomas expressed a totally opposite view from Kant,that is,different from Kant’s view that the phenomenal world is opposed to the in-itself thing,but using the perspective of connection,he proposed that there exists the free world and the natural world respectively,and the two have theoretical junctions while they are different from each other.The main content of this paper is based on Thomas Aquinas’ thought of free will,and explains a series of problems such as the theoretical root of his thought of free will,the cause of free will,the foundation of free will and the relationship between free will and reason.In conclusion,this paper will be divided into five parts to study Thomas Aquinas’ thoughts of free will.In the first part,it mainly summarizes the recent studies on Thomas Aquinas’ thoughts of free will at home and abroad,and points out the purpose and significance of this paper.The main content of the second part is the free will to trace the history of thought itself,and Thomas Aquinas on the inheritance and development of predecessors’ thought free will,the purpose is to understand free will thought and its historical evolution,in order to comprehensively learn the time background of Thomas Aquinas ideas of free will.The third part introduces the main content of Thomas Aquinas’thought of free will.Starting from the cause of free will,on the basis of describing the relationship between free will and reason,choice and habit and other elements,the conclusion is drawn by discussing the foundation of free will in Aristotle’s theory of happiness.That is,the will of people tends to the purpose dominated by reason,and the behavior they do is ultimately for the result recognized by reason--good;The fourth part mainly follows up the subsequent development of Thomas’s thoughts of free will on the basis of the previous research,mainly some theoretical ideas on free will of New Thomism.For example,the representative figure Maritan proposed that "freedom presets the order of nature.Therefore,there is nature with reason in expression "and" true free will is a complete sense,it meets the requirements of different dimensions,is a dynamic whole".All of this will go a long way towards establishing a general framework for the study of the idea of free will;Finally,in the fifth part,the author will evaluate and reflect on Thomas’s thought of free will,trying to find out the influence of his thought on the later generations.And we must treat his free will thought objectively and dialectically,in order to get real enlightenment from the historical influence of his thought.