Is Free Will an Illusion? The Metaphysics and Psychology of Choice | Prof. Joshua Hochschild

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"Concluding his lesson, Virgil reiterates that the will is necessarily oriented in a certain direction, but that some power to chart the course is in us. And he warns again that insofar as this power is considered free will, it may need the insight of faith rather than philosophy to fully expound.

'So, let’s concede that by necessity

rise all your loves that kindle into flame;

still you retain the power to rein them in.

For Beatrice this noble power’s name

is the free will [libero arbitrio]—remember it, be sure,

for she may wish to speak about the same.'

I take this whole passage from the heart of Dante's Divine Comedy to be an excellent summary of St. Thomas Aquinas' understanding of free will. Particularly, in putting forth three main theses. First, that the will's general orientation to the good is necessitated by God. Second, that freedom is a matter of judging how to fulfill that general orientation through particular choices. Third, that this judging depends on an exercise of reason." —Prof. Joshua Hochschild

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This lecture was given on January 27, 2022 at North Carolina State University.

The handout for this lecture can be found here

About the speaker:

Joshua Hochschild is the Monsignor Robert R. Kline Professor of Philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University, where he also served six years as the inaugural Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. His primary research is in medieval logic, metaphysics, and ethics, with broad interest in liberal education and the continuing relevance of the Catholic intellectual tradition. He is the author of The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia (2010), translator of Claude Panaccio’s Mental Language: From Plato to William of Ockham (2017), and co-author of A Mind at Peace: Reclaiming an Ordered Soul in the Age of Distraction (2017). His writing has appeared in First Things, Commonweal, Modern Age and the Wall Street Journal. For 2020-21 he’s been elected to serve as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.

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