What is Freewill? And Do We Have It? | Prof. Paul Symington

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 27 February 2024

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was given on November 18th, 2023, at University of South Florida.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events

About the speaker:

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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1:08.2	All right, so I want to welcome you guys all tonight here.
1:11.6	Thanks for coming to hear a little bit about some ideas about free will,
1:17.6	particularly the question about what free will is and whether we have it,
1:23.6	both of those being important questions.
1:25.6	But first I just want to thank you all, particularly for Mr. Novak and the Temistic Institute,
1:31.9	your new chapter, I understand at USF here, and all your support team for their work to making this event happen tonight.
1:42.2	So in general tonight, I just want to provide an overview as to how
1:47.6	free will has been viewed kind of in a general way by Thomas Aquinas and see how it
1:55.6	might contribute to some understanding of this issue within a contemporary context.
2:01.6	And so just to be clear, I'm a philosopher, not a scientist, so I'll be coming at this from a philosophical perspective.
2:08.6	But I will sort of look at some of these arguments at the end of the presentation that you see against this idea,
	...

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