Do We Have Free Will? | Fr. Stephen Brock

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 3 July 2024

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on March 25th, 2024, at University of Texas at Austin.

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About the Speaker:

Stephen L. Brock is a priest of the Prelature of Opus Dei (ordained 1992). He is Ordinary Professor of Medieval Philosophy at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, where he began teaching in 1990. Since 2008 he has been an Ordinary Member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Since 2017 he has been a visiting professor in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Chicago. He is the author of Action & Conduct: Thomas Aquinas and the Theory of Action (T&T Clark, 1998); The Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas: A Sketch (Wipf & Stock, 2015); The Light that Binds: a Study in Thomas Aquinas's Metaphysics of Natural Law (Wipf & Stock, 2020); and numerous articles on various aspects of Aquinas’s thought.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.8	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:13.1	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.1	To learn more and to attend these events,
0:21.6	visit us at to mystic institute.org.
0:25.6	So I've been asked to talk about whether we have free will.
0:30.6	And I suppose the expectation is that I'll try to defend the existence
0:35.6	of free will. And I guess in a sense that's what I'll try to defend the existence of free will.
0:38.3	And I guess in a sense that's what I'll do,
0:41.3	but maybe in a kind of indirect way.
0:46.3	Because I don't think that the existence of free will
0:49.3	really needs to be proved or defended, at least directly.
0:53.3	It's kind of too obvious to doubt in a real way,
0:58.0	any practical way, I think.
1:00.0	Every time we stop and deliberate about what we're going to do,
1:05.0	we're exercising our free will, I would say.
1:09.0	And it seems to me that often even the people who argue
1:14.6	against free will, and there are, there are a lot of them,
1:17.6	but often in the very course of their arguments,
1:20.6	they seem to assume that we have it.
1:23.6	I'll just give you one example.
1:25.6	I suppose that at least some of you have heard of Sam Harris.
	...

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