Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Articles

Thanks for the Memories

Trevor Emmott explains why ‘acts of will’ may exist after all.

At home on a warm afternoon, you suddenly feel thirsty. So you rise from your chair, walk to the kitchen and prepare a drink.

How does that series of physical actions get started? Do you will it to begin? In other words, is the physical activity preceded and somehow brought about by an act of will?

That was certainly the traditional view. John Locke, for example, writing in 1690, claimed that we begin movements of our bodies by thoughts which ‘order’ the doing of the physical action.

Modern philosophers, though, have tended to be sceptical about acts of will, or ‘volitions’, as Locke called them.

…