INTRODUCTION

In the first two chapters, I present the basic elements of the scholastic view. The first chapter focuses on the notion of desire at the center of the scholastic view. According to the scholastic view, for an agent to desire X is for X to appear to be good to this agent from a certain evaluative perspective. Section 1.2 introduces what Kant calls the “old formula of the schools,” the claim that we desire only what we conceive to be good. I define a scholastic view as any view committed to the old formula of the schools. However, I will be interested only in scholastic views that understand the notion of the good in the way presented in the introduction: The good is supposed to be the formal end of practical inquiry in the same way that truth is the formal end of theoretical inquiry. Thus, one can take “conceiving to be good” as analogous to “conceiving to be true.” To say that desiring is conceiving something to be good is to say that a desire represents its object, perhaps implicitly, as good – that is, as something that is worth being pursued. Of course, in this sense of “conceiving,” the claim that in desiring something I conceive it to be good is not particularly strong. Compare this, for instance, with what can be said about imagining. If I imagine p, I do conceive, at least implicitly, that p is true.