BIG IDEAS IN THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES: DO WE HAVE FREE WILL?
Emeritus Professor Anwar Suleman Mall, University of Cape Town
Tuesday 21–Wednesday 22 January 5.00 pm COURSE FEES R220; Staff and students R110
Are we as a species endowed with the capacity to make our own choices? Do we have free will? This seems to be one of the big questions challenging biologists today. How can there be free will in a determined Universe? This is based on a contradictory notion of ‘compatibilism’: The world is deterministic and there is free will. According to the philosopher Thomas Nagel, the major discourse of reductive materialism that dominates modern biological thought has failed to explain the ‘non-material’ mind (Nagel, 2012). The current literature provides much evidence of the integration of biology and psychology. One of the relevant and fascinating topics that has arisen out of these new ideas is the question of free will.
This course will focus mainly (but not entirely) on the ideas of two major thinkers representing diametrically opposing views for and against free will.
Lecture titles
- Introduction and the deterministic view
- Do we have free will?
Recommended reading
Ball, P. 2023. How life works. USA: University of Chicago Press.
Gazzaniga, M.S. 2011. Who’s in charge? Free will and the science of the brain. USA. Harper Collins Publishers.
Mitchell, K.J. 2023. Free Agents: how evolution gave us free will. USA. Princeton University Press.
Nagel, T. 2012. Mind and Cosmos: why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sapolsky, R. 2003. Determined: the science of life without free will. United Kingdom: Vintage Books.
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