Is Free Will an Illusion?| Timothy Pawl

The Thomistic Institute

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4.8 • 873 Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2018

⏱️ 63 minutes

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Summary

This talk was offered on October 17th, 2018 at Brown University. For more info about upcoming TI events, visit: thomisticinstitute.org/events-1/

Speaker Bio:

Tim Pawl is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of St. Thomas, in St. Paul, MN, where he works on metaphysics and philosophical theology. In metaphysics he works on "truthmaker theory, modality, and free will. In philosophical theology, he has published on transubstantiation, Christology, and divine immutability. Publications where his work has appeared include: The Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Faith and Philosophy, and Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion. A listing of his publications is available on his PhilPapers Profile. Additionally, Prof. Pawl published a monograph in the Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology series, entitled In Defense of Conciliar Christology: A Philosophical Essay. In this book he argues that the philosophical objections to the traditional Christian doctrine of the incarnation fail.

Prof. Pawl currently leads a grant with Gloria Frost called The Classical Theism Project, and recently finished a grant in collaboration with Kevin Timpe called Exploring the Interim State Writing Workshop. He is the husband of another philosopher, Faith Glavey Pawl, and the proud father of one son and four daughters.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Today we're going to talk about whether free will is an illusion, and the means by which we'll do it is to first have some distinctions, to find some terms about what free will means, what it may or may not be consistent with.
0:13.0	There you have those on page one of your handout. Next, we'll give an argument for why free will isn't consistent with being determined in your actions,
0:22.6	but otherwise if something determines you to do what it is that you do, then you're not free in that instance.
0:28.6	And then we'll turn to Thomas Aquinas and we'll see the sort of arguments he gives for why he does think we have free will.
0:35.6	He never, as far as I know, considers the question whether or not free will is an illusion. But he does think we have free will. He never, as far as I know, considers the question whether or not free will is an illusion.
0:41.0	But he does ask the question whether we have free will.
0:43.4	And I suppose if the answer to that was no, that's a good reason to think that the seeming that we do is an illusion.
0:48.6	So it's the closest I think you can get in his writings to it.
0:50.7	But he's got a nifty argument, and we'll talk about that argument that's on page two of your handout, some reasons to support the premises of the argument
0:57.8	as well. The general method is an analytic philosophy method. We'll be presenting
1:03.5	the argument clearly, numbered lines, if this, then that, and if the other thing, then the third
1:08.7	thing. We'll be giving defenses for each of those
1:10.8	premises. So that's the plan. That's what we'll be doing here. Take a look then at your handout,
1:18.0	and you'll see on the top, Section A, some definitions. The first one is a definition of determinism,
1:25.6	and that's the thesis that the past, plus the laws of nature,
1:29.8	entail any future state of the world.
1:32.4	You can think about it like this.
1:33.8	It's a thesis that if you stop time, say God stops time
1:36.9	and rolls it back, so to speak, a half hour,
1:39.3	everything will happen exactly how it happened this first time around.
1:42.6	And if you were to stop time a hundred times in a row
1:45.0	and roll it back a half hour each time,
	...

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