Bump.
Yea I can’t think of any either. I keep hearing that Descartes Dualism has been dismissed over the years which leads me to believe that the material view has to be the leading theory, which would mean all life is determined by the physical (ipso facto means no true free will), which would in turn have to be in opposition of the teachings of Traditional Christianity.
I don’t understand why dualism should be essential to free will, nor why there cannot be limitations to our free will. Everything else in human life has strict limits.
The reason I say that (and I’m really thinking and writing at the same) is, if there is no duality, than the mind and the brain aren’t separate. This means that everything is determined inside the brain and we truly don’t have free will. Studies have shown that before a person makes a decision to do something, a firing off of synapses in the brain occurs and this triggers our actions. So wouldn’t this mean that we are slaves to our brain? I don’t know, it seems this is either above my level of comprehension or I’m just ignorant of something. That’s why I came here. Hopefully someone knows of something I don’t. haha
Although he is not a Christian David Chalmers, The Character of Consciousness argues persuasively against a physicalist view of mind. He gets very technical in some places, still he lays out the basics of his argument as well in an accessible way.
Not quite. Cartesian dualism is false, yes, but to my knowledge the Church puts forth what basically amounts to Aristotle’s hylemorphic dualism theory which is different from Descartes’ theory in that it posits that all substances are unions of form and matter. The form of a human being is a rational soul which is immaterial. Instead of it being like a ball and a “ghost” ball that fits inside the real ball and controls it, the relationship between soul and body is like that of the shape of a triangle with the ink in which the triangle is written.
I absolutely second this! Prof. Feser covers a lot of this topic in his books and on his blog: edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/01/against-neurobabble.html
I’m not sure just what you’re after, but in regards to human nature, the text that is my all time favorite is “Philosophical Psychology” by D. Q. McInerny (a seminary philosophy professor for the Fraternity of St. Peter).
Not just within ones own brain, but also the influences of others within the environment. This doesn’t necessarily mean that “free will” is absent (depending on what you mean by free will). There is a book that looks at intelligence in natural, artificial, and social entities that looked at this problem (“Swarm Intelligence” by Kennedy, Eberhart). If I can find the section in the book that talked about this I’ll post it back here.
Balto is right.
Aristotle’s point here, I think, is that the intellect (Nous) is a power that depends directly on the soul. Whereas the sensitive powers (Aristotle admits of the five “external” senses and then other “internal” senses") have a proper organ, because they are essentially material operations, the intellect does not.
Right. I think I was unclear in saying, “This is a point on which Aquinas had to modify Aristotle.” They agreed that the intellect had no bodily organ and that the human form was essentially immaterial. Aristotle did not take this as implying that the soul persists after death.
Originally Posted by polytropos View Post
Aristotle argued that the intellect had no bodily organ, which sounds odd to us, but what he meant was that intellectual operations (particularly the abstraction of universal forms from particular substances in the world)was a necessarily immaterial operation.
If we were slaves to our brain “we” would be superfluous! Why believe in an impotent entity?
Common sense tells us that we are conscious. Common sense also tells us that abstract knowledge of the universe and how it works, though originally obtained through the senses, would be useless if there were not a non-material part of us that transcends the material. Is the number “4” merely a little material figure inside my brain that I can call up at will? Prove it. Can you open up a man’s brain and out spills his entire life of memories and reasoning and hopes and desires? Prove it.
Feser, Edward. Philosophy of Mind
If pure materialism were to be true, as Matter is inherently mechanistic (its actions are a predetermined chain of cause and effect) and all phenomenon is material- the appearance of ‘free will’ is an illusion in a mechanistically determined chain. This would be an extreme position within materialism, because Materialism is struggle to get over many problems within Philosophy of Mind- to the point I would contend you can not rationally accept it without incoherency.
If we’re talking specifics (and technical) arguments against Materialism, I would recommend getting the entire book of ‘The Waning of Materialism’. The ‘book’, which is better termed anthology, is a collection of papers written specifically in refutation of materialism and in proposing alternatives (some Cartesian, some not; including one of the leading Thomists in Britain) on a academic level. Some papers in there are more accessible then others, for instance I found the paper on Kripke almost inaccessible, this is,however, due to my own deficiencies with modern symbolic logic. If you have access to Oxford Scholarship Online they have the book in ebook format there, if not it would be worth buying it.
Thanks for the recommendation. I have stumbled across it before, but since there was only one review, I was wondering what others thought of it. I’m glad you liked it as well. Unfortunately, I just don’t think I’d be remotely capable to taking even the more accessible essays in right now (I’m still a high school student, so I’ve had precious little teaching in logic or philosophy). Michael Rea’s World without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism is also something I have been looking at, but it too looks fairly technical (on top of being over $40 for a 256 page book). Still, thanks for the recommendation. I hope to get it eventually, and it seems that based upon what you’ve said, it’ll be a worthwhile read.