Title: "How to Control Your Will and Succeed in Life" Abstract. Controlling our wills, by common consent, is one of the keys to success in life. But how do we do it? Historically, there are two kinds of answers. One kind of answer goes back to Augustine and, before him, to the Stoics: that the fragmentation of our various wills is a kind of disease that makes happiness impossible. But neither the Stoics nor Augustine could offer a persuasive account of how we cure ourselves of that disease. This led later medieval philosophers to a different kind of answer: that we have within us a power of will that has the freedom to control itself. This idea of a free will is the origin of the freewill problem as we now understand it. But does it make sense? Can the will control itself? Or do we have to fall back on the sort of story that Augustine told? In that case it is not clear that we have any control over our wills at all. Perhaps that is exactly why success is life is so elusive!
