Freedom in the World of Powers. A Thomistic Account
of  Two-Way Powers and their Subjects

Michał Głowala  ⁞  University of Wrocław, Poland

Book Description 

There has been growing interest in recent decades in powers-based accounts of some crucial topics in metaphysics, including modalities, causality, agency, or laws of nature. My present area of interest is a powers-based account of freedom, focusing on the nature of two-way powers. Many prominent philosophers (for example, O’Connor, Lowe, Alvarez, Pink, Stump, Rooney) developed some crucial insights in this area. It seems, however, that there is still much unclarity concerning the interrelated net of issues concerning libertarianism and compatibilism, agent causality, two-way powers, reasons for action or volitionism. In my book, I hope to offer an integrated account of many of these interrelated issues, based on a far more detailed account of the nature of two-way powers and their relationship to agent causality, causality and freedom. From a historical point of view, my main inspirations come from the late scholastic Thomistic debates with Molinists and libertarians from the nominalistic and Scotistic camps. These Thomistic debates and standpoints are relatively unknown today, but I hope they still do offer a very attractive unifying framework for dealing with various issues surrounding two-way powers – freedom, agent causality, causal determination or volitions.

About Author

Michał Głowala teaches philosophy at Wrocław University, Poland. His main area of research is late scholastic metaphysics, in particular the metaphysics of powers and agency in the context of contemporary analytic metaphysics and action theory. His publications include a monograph Singleness. Self-Individuation and Its Rejection in the Scholastic Debate on Principles of Individuation (2016) and a number of papers confronting scholastic and analytic metaphysics (including “Physical Intentionality and the Thomistic Theory of Formal Objects”, “Polygeny, Pleiotropy, and Two Kinds of Concurrentist Ontology” and “Power Individuation: A New Version of the Single-Tracking View”). Currently he is working on a book discussing the Thomistic theory of freedom from the perspective of contemporary debates between compatibilism and libertarianism within the project “The Metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas. A Critical Re-Evaluation” led by the International Society for Formal Ontology.