Camden Philosophical Society: Free Will

Following up on its December discussion of Hannah Arendht’s late work on “Willing,” the Camden Philosophical Society will begin its Tuesday, Jan. 20 session with a talk by long-standing participant Lloyd Gillespie on “Free Will: The Compatibilist Bridge Over Troubled Waters: Freedom as Process Philosophy.” The accompanying reading for the discussion is a 1971 article by recently deceased American philosopher Harry Frankfurt on “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person.”

The Jan. 20 session will, as usual, be a hybrid gathering from 3:30-5:30 pm Eastern Time on the third Tuesday of the month. All are welcome to participate, in-person at the Picker Room of the Camden Public Library or by Zoom. That goes for visitors, as well as year-rounders in Maine, and friends of the Society wherever you may be.

If you wish to join via Zoom, please let us know by return email (Reply All). You will receive a Zoom invitation on the day of the meeting. Click on the “Join Zoom Meeting” link in that invitation at the time of the event

In explaining the topic of his talk, Gillespie notes, “Compatibilism seeks a middle path: Free will is compatible with determinism because freedom is not about ‘metaphysical origination’ but about the ‘nature of the decision process’. From thinkers like Hume and Frankfurt, a free act is one that arises from one’s own desires, beliefs, and character, without external coercion or internal compulsion.

“The key move is to define freedom within the causal web of the mind, not outside it. It is said, You are free if you can act according to your ‘second-order volitions’ – the desires you want to have (Frankfurt, 1971). This makes freedom a psychological property, not a physical one. Volition, the faculty or power of using one’s will, plays a large part in Frankfurt’s paper.” This paper and an associated essay published later as the short book “On Bullshit” made Frankfurt something of a public intellectual for a time in the early part of this century. From 1990 onward, he was a professor and then professor emeritus at Princeton.

The reading is 17 pages and can be found here: https://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~schopra/Persons/Frankfurt.pdf “I hope we can have a lively discussion,” Lloyd adds.