Free Will

In the 500th edition of the programme, Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the philosophical idea of free will.Free will - the extent to which we are free to choose our own actions - is one of the most absorbing philosophical problems, debated by almost every great thinker of the last two thousand years. In a universe apparently governed by physical laws, is it possible for individuals to be responsible for their own actions? Or are our lives simply proceeding along preordained paths? Determinism - the doctrine that every event is the inevitable consequence of what goes before - seems to suggest so.Many intellectuals have concluded that free will is logically impossible. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza regarded it as a delusion. Albert Einstein wrote: “Human beings, in their thinking, feeling and acting are not free agents but are as causally bound as the stars in their motion.” But in the Enlightenment, philosophers including David Hume found ways in which free will and determinism could be reconciled. Recent scientific developments mean that this debate remains as lively today as it was in the ancient world.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Simon Blackburn 4 episodes
  Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge
• Helen Beebee 2 episodes
  Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham
• Galen Strawson 3 episodes
  Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading

Related episodes

• Freedom
  
  4 Jul, 2002 320 Political science
• Consciousness
  
  25 Nov, 1999 120 Epistemology
• Genetic Determinism
  
  23 Sep, 1999 570 Biology
• Human Nature
  
  7 Nov, 2002 150 Psychology
• Hegel’s Philosophy of History
  
  26 May, 2022 900 History
• Laws of Nature
  
  19 Oct, 2000 500 Science
• The Ontological Argument
  
  27 Sep, 2012 100 Philosophy
• Existentialism
  
  28 Jun, 2001 100 Philosophy
• Imagination and Consciousness
  
  29 Jun, 2000 120 Epistemology
• David Hume
  
  6 Oct, 2011 100 Philosophy
• Bergson and Time
  
  9 May, 2019 110 Metaphysics
• Scepticism
  
  5 Jul, 2012 100 Philosophy
• The Physics of Time
  
  18 Dec, 2008 530 Physics
• Science in the 20th century
  
  5 Nov, 1998 500 Science
• Materialism
  
  24 Apr, 2008 100 Philosophy
• Chaos Theory
  
  16 May, 2002 500 Science
• Wittgenstein
  
  4 Dec, 2003 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• Logic
  
  21 Oct, 2010 160 Philosophical logic
• Chance and Design
  
  13 Feb, 2003 210 Philosophy and theory of religion
• Good and Evil
  
  1 Apr, 1999 200 Religion

---

Programme ID: b00z5y9z

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00z5y9z

Auto-category: 100 (Philosophy)