As against the claims of determinism, volition, or free will, is an inescapable fact of  human nature and an integral part of our rational faculty. In this video presentation Will Thomas discusses three aspects of human volition: self-awareness, perceptual attention, and conceptual focus. Objectivism holds that the root of volition is the choice to think or not. Thomas explains how this choice allows us control over our thoughts, lives, and actions; and  why the failure to think, the evasion of the facts, lies at the root of human dysfunction and evil. (This is Lecture 3 in our Atlas University Reason course .)