Title: What Is a Free Will? Reflections on Suárez by Dominik Perler (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Philosophy)
Date: Thursday, April 17, 2025
Time: 1530-1700
Room: H232
Abstract: Why are we free in our actions? Suárez, an influential late scholastic author, gives a clear answer: we are free because we have a free will. The will is never determined to accept the action-guiding judgment that is presented by the intellect. As a two-way power, it can always accept or reject it. But what enables it to do that? The paper discusses this question by con-necting Suárez’s theory of the will to his theory of causation. It first examines his arguments against intellectual determinism, paying particular attention to his claim that the intellect is not an efficient cause; it cannot act upon the will and force it to accept a judgment. The pa-per then analyzes Suárez’s account of the relevant cause by focusing on the goal of an action. The goal acts as a final cause, and if the goal is not perfectly good, it does not fully attract the will; hence, the will can reject it. The paper spells out the functioning of the final cause as a form of normative attraction and argues that the issue of normativity is at the center of Suárez’s theory of the will: we are free because our will can resist normative attraction.
About the speaker: Dominik Perler is Professor of Philosophy at Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, and co-director of the research center “Human Abilities.” His research focuses on medieval and early modern philosophy, mostly in the areas of metaphysics, epistemology, and theory of action. His re-cent book publications include Feelings Transformed: Philosophical Theories of the Emotions, 1270-1670 (2018), Eine Person sein: Philosophische Debatten im Spätmittelalter (2020), Causation and Cognition in Early Modern Philosophy (co-editor, 2020), Powers and Abilities in Early Modern Philosophy (co-editor, 2024).
Organized by the Department of Philosophy
Web: phil.bilkent.edu.tr