Aquinas, Freedom, and the Brain | Fr. Anselm Ramelow, O.P.

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Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 13 July 2022

⏱️ 55 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on October 12, 2021 at Iowa State University. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Fr. Anselm Ramelow is a Catholic priest in the Order of Preachers. He is professor of philosophy at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley and currently the chair of the philosophy department. He obtained his doctorate under Robert Spaemann in Munich on Leibniz and the Spanish Jesuits (Gott, Freiheit, Weltenwahl, 1997) and did theological work on George Lindbeck and the question of a Thomist philosophy and theology of language (Beyond Modernism? - George Lindbeck and the Linguistic Turn in Theology, 2005). He contributed articles to the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophy and essays on topics at the intersection of philosophy and theology, as well as a translation and commentary on part of Aquinas’ De veritate. He continues to work on questions of free will, philosophy of religion (miracles, existence and nature of God) and philosophical aesthetics.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.
0:03.2	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:11.0	As you can see, I mean, there's quietness, freedom, and the brain, and the brain is very prominent.
0:16.0	And before we zero on the brain, I think we have to zoom out a little bit, you know, because
0:22.9	sometimes one can lose the connections if one gets the microscopic view.
0:30.1	And so freedom is something we look at, not just in terms of the brain and such things,
0:34.5	but also in society and politics and so forth, and they are all connected
0:39.6	notions, I think. And in our contemporary culture, choice is an important good that people
0:47.6	want to defend. So we want things to be our choice, and our choice is not to be interfered with.
0:57.0	And that can sometimes amount really to almost like the highest value that people defend.
1:04.0	Whatever else there is, there is nothing that can impose on that. It's the ultimate kind of rubric under which I look at things.
1:12.6	And now let's say we have all the choices that we want,
1:17.6	everything is that put at our disposal.
1:20.6	Then what do we do with our freedom?
1:24.6	And why is that even a question? If choice is an ultimate value, if it is the ultimate goal for which we live,
1:34.3	that question should answer itself. You just choose, right?
1:38.3	But if you have further questions of, well, what should I choose?
1:43.3	What is my choice therefore? I think you are on to
1:47.2	something because I think choice and free choice freedom is indeed not an end in itself it is a
1:54.9	means and that is why there is still a further question who do we want to be how do we want to be? How do we want to live? That is not a question
2:03.6	that is answered by saying, I have free choice. And the ultimate rubric under which we can put that is
2:13.6	something, certainly that is good. We always choose something as a good but I
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