David's thoughts on philosophy, economics, history, theology, and occasionally tennis...

I recently read Annaka Harris's "Conscious" and her husband Sam's "Free Will." Both were enjoyable reads, but their views on (our lack of) free will differ from my own, but rather than a deep dive on the topic I'd like to contest a key point they raise. Their cases against free will rest in part on neuroscience. In my view this is a category error. The reason is that modern science generally--and the Ben Libet experiments which both Sam and Annaka refer to specifically--rests on the assumption that things (the will, in Libet's case) can be explained in terms of what classical philosophers called "efficient" and "material" causes, while ignoring "formal" and "final" causes. The problem is, this is like trying to explain a poem by studying the ink (material cause) and the cause of its coming to be (efficient cause), but leaving out its meaning (formal cause) and why it was written (final cause). Of course, mater...

If recent surveys are correct, a growing number of Americans do not believe God exists . This is unsurprising. Most students today graduate from public high school with little or no introduction to philosophy. That is a shame. Most of the greatest minds throughout human history thought the existence of God followed from reason and observation of the natural world. Why? One reason has its origins in Aristotle. It goes as follows. Change occurs in the world around us. Seeds turn into plants. Ice melts into liquid. Cold water becomes warm. What these changes involve is what Aristotle called the “actualization of a potential.” That is, before seeds are actually plants, they are potentially plants; before ice is actually liquid, it is potentially liquid; before cold water is actually warm, it is potentially warm. In other words, change involves things going from “potentiality” to “actuality,” at which point, Aristotle would say, their potential is “actualized.” Good. Now, as we will see, t...