You are invited to attend our next monthly meeting to be held on Friday, December 8th from 3:00pm to 4:30pm. We will be discussing “Delimiting Freedom: Aquinas between Brain Science and Choice Gone Wild” by Anselm Ramelow from the Spring 2023 issue entitled The Spirit of Unity (Volume 50.1.4). The article can be downloaded from here.
Here is an excerpt from the Introduction to the issue:
Anselm Ramelow discusses the incoherence of a scientific denial of free will in “Delimiting Freedom: Aquinas between Brain Science and Choice Gone Wild.” Aquinas enables us to see that free choices are fundamentally immaterial because they are purposefully ordered to their universal good through particular means. At the same time, Aquinas grants both that the conditions of choice can be determined by material factors, and, even more significantly, that prior choices shape the context of our future action. Yet even this does not present a case against the reality of freedom: “[W]ith such a history our freedom increases, because much of the prehistory that influences our choices will be of our own making.”