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

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4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2022

⏱️ 46 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on January 27, 2022 at North Carolina State University. The handout for this lecture can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/37ttfuud. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. 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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute.
0:03.3	For more talks like this, visit us at tamisticinstitute.org.
0:10.9	Is free will an illusion the metaphysics and psychology of choice?
0:18.4	Halfway up Mount Pergatory, Dante and Virgil find themselves in the ring of sloth, where souls are purged of a defect of habitual inaction.
0:30.9	By their own failure to act, these poor saved sinners had made themselves unable to be rightly moved by God's love.
0:41.0	This prompts Dante to ask Virgil to explain the relationship between human freedom
0:46.9	and the motive force of divine love. So the beginning of the selection from Dante.
0:57.6	For if love's offered from outside of us,
1:06.1	Dante asks, and if the soul is moved by love alone, how then can it be meritorious, should we go right or wrong? Dante wants to understand how if God's love has power to move us, which is an
1:15.1	overarching theme not only of Purgatorio 18, but of the whole divine comedy, in what sense can
1:21.3	we be responsible for our own actions, subject to praise or blame, depending on whether they
1:26.9	are good or bad.
1:28.8	Virgil indicates a qualified willingness to answer Dante's question.
1:34.7	I'll tell you everything that reason sees.
1:38.6	Beyond that, wait for Beatrice still, for faith must do the work.
1:45.6	In other words, Virgil, the pagan, can provide the philosophical perspective of reason,
1:51.8	but certain further questions may have to wait for the saint, Beatrice, to provide the fuller
1:58.2	perspective of Christian faith.
2:01.5	Virgil continues, first explaining a basic orientation of the will
2:06.2	implanted in us by nature.
2:09.6	Every substantial form, distinct from matter yet united with it,
2:15.7	contains within itself its proper power, which, till it's moved, remains
	...

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