The Question of Free Will in the Modern World | Prof. Paul Symington

The Thomistic Institute

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4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 4 March 2020

⏱️ 60 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given at UC Berkeley on February 3, 2020.

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Professor Paul Symington graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in Philosophy and Religion from Roberts Wesleyan College in 1998. He received an M.A. in Theology from Northeastern Seminary in 2001 and an M.A. in Philosophy from Boston College in 2004. He graduated from the State University of New York at Buffalo with a Ph.D. in Philosophy in 2007. He then taught for one year at the University of San Francisco before receiving a position in 2008 at Franciscan University of Steubenville.

He was a Service-Learning Faculty Fellow at the University of San Francisco and received a NYS Professional Development Award from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2007. He is a member of The Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy, The American Catholic Philosophical Association, and The American Philosophical Association. His research is mainly focused on areas in metaphysics and medieval philosophy.

Transcript

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0:00.0	So as Braxton said, the topic for tonight is the question of free will in the modern world.
0:06.2	So basically, I'll provide a view of free will that can be interpreted as following after a perennial
0:13.5	philosophical tradition, for example, inspired by Aristotelian to mystic contributions to this topic, and see how it might be helpful for understanding the issue of free will
0:24.6	within a contemporary context.
0:30.6	So first we'll begin with just the common everyday persons assumptions about free will.
0:44.3	In fact, far from being a merely academic question, it turns out that free will is a valuable,
0:51.1	intuitive, and meaningful notion that does a good job of making sense of our own personal experience and our judgment of the behavior of others.
0:56.0	Here on the slide are three ideas we commonly associate with free will.
1:02.0	First, we have the ability to actualize distinct possibilities.
1:07.0	In other words, we participate in making a difference in the world by bringing out things that could be.
1:14.6	Not only this, but we stand simultaneously to multiple possibilities, one of which becomes a reality because of our own free choice.
1:24.6	Two, the second bullet point, that we have some degree of autonomy.
1:30.3	We are to some degree self-directing and self-governing as opposed to being merely exercised
1:38.3	by external causes and factors. So something that's contributed from us that we would say as a whole or as a person and
1:47.0	not merely as a sort of a fluctuation out from prior principles, let's say compositional
1:53.0	principles that make up our person.
1:55.0	Three, we are responsible for our choices.
1:58.0	We regret our previous bad choices because we know we are responsible for them,
2:02.6	and this because we have free will. Not only are these common ideas associated with free will,
2:09.6	but I think that they present a correct conception of free will, generally.
2:14.6	Human beings are generally responsible for their actions, they have a meaningful degree
2:19.3	of autonomy, and they are able to actualize distinct possibilities. That these views about free will and
	...

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