Abstract

Descartes' Fourth Meditation, on Truth and Falsity, bears on a notion of freedom that often was identified with a thomistic model. In this model the freedom of indifference is caused by an accidental lack of knowledge and is thus subordinated to the tendency to give spontaneously our assent to what we clearly perceive. However, exploring more in detail the relation between the understanding and the will (and the lumen naturale), it is argued that the will refers to a notion of freedom that does not coincide neither with the molinist notion of indifference, nor with the thomist notion of spontaneity