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The Thomistic Institute

True Freedom and Its Counterfeits | Prof. James Madden

The Thomistic Institute

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8729 Ratings

🗓️ 12 September 2020

⏱️ 38 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This talk was given as part of the Thomistic Institute's intellectual retreat, "Virtuous Autonomy: Freedom and Independence in a Technological Age," August 7 - 10, 2020.


For more events and info, please visit thomisticinstitute.org


Speaker bio:

Dr. James Madden is Professor of Philosophy at Benedictine College. He lives in Atchison, Kansas with his wife (Jennifer) and their six children. He is originally from Wisconsin, where he received a B.A. from St. Norbert College, and did his graduate work at Kent State (MA, 1998) and Purdue (Ph.D., 2002). He was awarded the Benedictine College Distinguished Educator of the Year Award in 2006. Prof. Madden's long term research interests are modern philosophy, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of mind.

Transcript

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0:00.0

What I'm going to do this morning is I'm mainly going to talk about freedom's counterfeits,

0:05.6

okay, and then this afternoon I'm going to talk a little bit more about what it would actually be to be free.

0:12.0

Another sort of prefatory note about this paper, this lecture, is this is, you know,

0:20.2

sort of a distillation of a larger work which we always say

0:24.4

when we're hedging which would basically an attempt to mediate a conversation

0:32.5

between a philosopher named Robert Brandom who's at the University of Pittsburgh

0:35.7

and Alastair Macintyre who maybe many of you heard of at Notre Dame. But I'm assuming that the

0:41.8

Brandon stuff would be very foreign to most of you, so I've dropped all the

0:45.5

quotations from Brandom out and I just sort of summarize it. And I just want to

0:49.5

note that because if this were ever to fall in Bob Branden's hands, I just want to

0:52.7

note that I know it's your stuff.

0:55.5

All right, here we go. All right, I take it that we are not entirely interested in the notion

1:01.5

of freedom of the will for its own sake, for mostly because of its implications, but mostly because

1:08.6

of its implications for our understanding of ourselves as responsible for our actions,

1:13.5

and therefore it's subject to some kind of moral or ethical evaluation.

1:18.1

We see ourselves as capable of ethically significant actions, that is, those doings for which

1:24.0

we might laud or shame people, and in this way, we honor or scorn our and other

1:29.8

people's actions in a way that we do not appraise the doings of non-human animals or occurrences

1:36.3

among inanimate beings. That is not to deny that we evaluate such doings or occurrences at all, one might rightly conclude that a bit of hunting

1:49.7

by his pet chameleon was particularly magnificent, or that the destructive movements of a certain

1:54.7

tornado were extraordinarily terrible.

1:56.6

I live in Kansas and I have a chameleon so you can show my cards. The difference between our attitudes

...

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