Willing and Understanding. Late Medieval Debates on the Will, the Intellect, and Practical Knowledge

Willing and Understanding: Late Medieval Debates on the Will, the Intellect, and Practical Knowledge features a variety of issues in and approaches to debating the problem of the will in the late Middle Ages. While Terence Henry Irwin’s well-known question—“Who discovered the will?”1—still remains one of the pillars of will-centered debates, recent research has shown that the very notion of the will is anything but strictly defined, and that it covers disparate capacities and acts. The conundrum of the will encompasses a cluster of issues, some of them standard, others ephemeral, and yet others stirring up new ideas that pave the way for novel frameworks and methods of investigation. The will-intellect problem is often considered the cornerstone of the medieval debate on the will.