Presenter(s): Simon Narode
Oral Session 3 SW
David Hume was an 18th century philosopher who sought to reconcile the notion of free will with causal necessity. The conflict is that if the world unfolds in a causal order, and all of our actions and decisions are predetermined, how can we call ourselves free? In answering this question, Hume tried to redefine freedom such that it was compatible with causality. My paper argues that Hume failed in this endeavor. He redefined freedom as “a power of acting or not acting according to the determinations of the will,” but did not specify the temporal relationship of the will to its corresponding action. For instance, can we know ourselves to be free if the action we are willing is located in the future instead of the past? I challenge Hume’s thesis by reading it in relation to time. Through this lens, I highlight the epistemic problems of uncertainty concerning events of the past, present, and future, and demonstrate how Hume is unsuccessful at accounting for free will in a deterministic world.