Jail break: Tallis and the prison of nature
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Thomas W. Clark
Abstract
In Freedom: An Impossible Reality, Ray Tallis argues that we escape imprisonment by causal determinism, and thus gain free will, by the virtual distance from natural laws afforded us by intentionality, a human capacity that he claims cannot be naturalized. I respond that we can’t know in advance that intentionality will never be subsumed by science, and that our capacities to entertain possibilities and decide among them are natural cognitive endowments that supervene on generally reliable neural processes. Moreover, any disconnection from the multi-level determinants that account for human behavior cannot augment, but would likely undermine, effective human agency. Our full inclusion in nature, understood in terms of a pragmatic, explanatory determinism, is therefore not a prison from which we need to escape.
Acknowledgements
I’m grateful to James Tartaglia for helpful comments on this paper.
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© 2022 Institute for Research in Social Communication, Slovak Academy of Sciences
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Introduction a book symposium on Raymond Tallis’s Freedom: An impossible reality
- Disarming causation in the service of agency: Tallis on Hume
- Causation without the causal theory of action
- Free will: Dr Johnson was right
- Jail break: Tallis and the prison of nature
- Free will: An impossible reality or an incoherent concept?
- Libertarianism in disguise
- Freedom: An enactive possibility
- On the importance of a human-scale breadth of view: Reading Tallis’ freedom
- The seemingly ordinary complexity of daily life
- The ontology of freedom
- Freedom. An impossible reality
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Introduction a book symposium on Raymond Tallis’s Freedom: An impossible reality
- Disarming causation in the service of agency: Tallis on Hume
- Causation without the causal theory of action
- Free will: Dr Johnson was right
- Jail break: Tallis and the prison of nature
- Free will: An impossible reality or an incoherent concept?
- Libertarianism in disguise
- Freedom: An enactive possibility
- On the importance of a human-scale breadth of view: Reading Tallis’ freedom
- The seemingly ordinary complexity of daily life
- The ontology of freedom
- Freedom. An impossible reality
