Chairs and Tables Are Onds, but You Don't Think That Free Will Exists

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

i don't see a principled reason to accept the existence of chairs, but not the existence of free will. Could i have more respect for an attitude that says, neither one of them exists? I get that no chairs and tables are onds, and see the reference. And we can stipulate that there are clear examples of them and what those examples consist in. But if you and ia sought to identify a clear case of free will, right, we wouldn't be able to do that. We would identify an action that somebody undertook, and you would say that action was an example of acting freely. And i would say it is not.

We humans love to tell ourselves stories about why things happened the way they did; if the stories are sufficiently serious, we label this activity "history." Part of getting history right is simply an accurate recounting of the facts, but part of it is generally taken to be some kind of explanation about why. How much should we trust these explanations? This is a question with philosophical implications as well as historical ones, and philosopher Alex Rosenberg's new book How History Gets Things Wrong claims that we should basically not trust them at all. It's not that we get the facts wrong, it's that we have wrong ideas about causality and how the human mind works, and we can't help but import these wrong ideas to our beliefs about history. Alex and I dig into how this claim arises naturally from a certain way that naturalists should think about the world. Alex Rosenberg is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, with secondary appointments in biology and political science. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the Lakatos Award for the best book in the philosophy of science. Rosenberg is the author of numerous books and articles on philosophical aspects of various subjects, including biology, cognitive science, economics, history, causation, and atheism. He has also written two novels, The Girl from Krakow and Autumn in Oxford. Web site Duke home page Wikipedia page Amazon author page Interview at 3:AM Interview at What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.