CEFISES Seminar: Mario De Cario, « Defending free will against contemporary skepticism »

Livestream https://youtu.be/jdeXnbO78T0

Series: Metametaphysics

Speaker: Mario De Cario (Università Roma Tre / Tufts University)

Title: « Defending free will against contemporary skepticism »

Abstract

« Everyone who does evil is the cause of his own evildoing,” wrote Augustine, expressing the view – widely prevailing in the course of the history of philosophy – that free will is a necessary condition of moral responsibility, which in turn is an undeniable component of our worldview. Indeed, in the past, very few thinkers used to deny that human free will is real.

Today, however, the situation appears very different. For example, according to the renowned Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, “most scientists and philosophers agree” that free will “is an illusion.” “Most” is a big word here, but at least among scientists, what Bloom says sounds plausible since free-will denialists include heavy-weights such as Wolf Singer, Chris Frith, Steven Pinker, Stephen Hawking, Jerry Coyne, Daniel Wegner, Richard Dawkins, and Thomas Metzinger. In contemporary philosophy, the situation may seem less desperate; still, even in that area, there certainly is a remarkable increase in the number (and loquacity) of free will denialists: think of Derk Pereboom, Sam Harris, Gregg Caruso, Saul Smilansky, and Galen Strawson.

In my talk, I will analyze some of the main contemporary lines of attack against free will (many of which are based on extreme forms of scientistic naturalism), arguing that they are much less compelling than many tend to think.