Freedom, Reality & the Limits of Metaphysics

Eight steps to the edge: are we free, is the world mind-independent, and is metaphysics knowledge at all?

A course on the thought of Metaphysics.

What you will learn

  • State the threat: determinism + the consequence argument seem to rule out doing otherwise.
  • State Hume's compatibilism: liberty = unconstrained action on one's own will, compatible with necessity.
  • State Kant's two-standpoints answer (determined as appearance, free as rational agent) and its cost.
  • State 'existence precedes essence' and why it implies radical freedom and responsibility.
  • Understand 'condemned to be free,' bad faith, and anguish.
  • Contrast Sartre's libertarian, no-fixed-nature freedom with Hume's compatibilism and Kant's noumenal freedom.
  • State Berkeley's esse est percipi and his argument against mind-independent matter.
  • State Kant's transcendental idealism: empirical realism + transcendental ideality (appearances, not things-in-themselves).

Course outline

  1. Are We Free? — The free-will problem. If determinism is true — every choice necessitated by past + laws — could we ever do otherwise? Hume's compatibilism: liberty just is acting on your own will without…
  2. Condemned to Be Free — Sartre rejects the whole determinist framing for human existence. There is no fixed human nature: existence precedes essence; we are nothing but what we make ourselves through free choice. We are…
  3. Is Reality Mind-Dependent? — Is there a world independent of minds? Berkeley denies matter outright: to be (for sensible things) is to be perceived — there are only minds and ideas; 'matter' is an incoherent abstraction. Kant's…
  4. The Absolute — Hegel's audacious response to Kant: if we only reach reality as structured by thought, drop the unknowable thing-in-itself — reality and reason are one. The Absolute is the whole of reality as a…
  5. Is There a Way the World Is? — Rorty's pragmatist challenge to the realism question itself. There is no 'mirror of nature' — no theory-independent way the world is that our beliefs represent more or less accurately. Truth is not…
  6. Is Metaphysics Even Meaningful? — The most radical attack: not that metaphysics is false, but that it is meaningless. Ayer's verification principle — a (non-analytic) statement is meaningful only if empirically verifiable — classes…
  7. The Return of Metaphysics — How metaphysics came back. Quine's 'Two Dogmas' dismantled the analytic/synthetic distinction (and reductionism) that positivism needed — so the sharp line between meaningless metaphysics and…
  8. What Is Metaphysics? — The Last Word — The program's capstone, in the voice that opened it. Aristotle returns to gather the whole of First Philosophy: what metaphysics is (the study of being as such), how it proceeds, what it has and has…

Works read in this course

  • Hume, Enquiry §8 'Of Liberty and Necessity' — compatibilism
  • Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Third Antinomy) / Groundwork — transcendental freedom; acting under the idea of freedom
  • Sartre, Being and Nothingness / Existentialism Is a Humanism — radical freedom; bad faith; existence precedes essence
  • Berkeley, Principles / Three Dialogues — esse est percipi; immaterialism
  • Hegel, Phenomenology / Encyclopaedia Logic — the Absolute; the rational is the real
  • Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) — anti-representationalism; no mirror of nature; pragmatist anti-realism
  • Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936) — the verification principle; the elimination of metaphysics
  • Quine, 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' (1951) — the fall of analytic/synthetic; the web of belief; metaphysics rehabilitated

Terms introduced

determinism, compatibilism, libertarian (free will), the consequence argument, bad faith (Sartre), idealism, esse est percipi, transcendental idealism, the Absolute, realism vs anti-realism, verification principle, the two dogmas

Part of the Simposeum course library.