自由意志問題作為西方心靈哲學中的一個傳統問題，一直受到哲學界廣泛的關注和高度的重視。而中世紀經院哲學的系統化人物托馬斯．阿奎那是西螃自由意志研究的開創者和奠基者之一。他的貢獻不僅僅在於對自由意志的描述性明以及對自由意志各概念所作的細緻分析，還在於他在對自由意志的討論中引進了感性意欲和理性意欲、必然性和偶然性、人的行為和人性行為等一系列範疇。儘管後來他的自由意志學說遭到了多方面的非議和責難，但是，他通過運用上述範疇對當時在自由意志研究中站主導地位的決定論和非決定論的調和，無疑為我們解決傳統的自由意志問題提供了條新的思路，也為我們認識行為的結構圖景提供了一種新的範式。

Free will, a traditional problem with the western philosophy of mind, has attracted close attention and has been highly valued, and Thomas Aquinas, as the authority of medieval scholasticism, was one of the founders of the western study of free will. He descriptively explained the freedom of will, meticulously analyzed its concepts, and introduced a series of categories in his discussion of free will, like emotional intention and rational intention, inevitability and contingency, human behavior and humane behavior. Aquinas’s theory was criticized and censured afterwards. But by reconciling determinism and non-determinism through the use of aforementioned categories, he not only gave us a new way of thinking to solve the traditional problem of free will, but also provided us with a new paradigm to understand the prospect of human behavior.