Professor Raymond Tallis – Freedom: The Impossible Reality

Please note: this event is online only

The question of free will has preoccupied philosophers for millennia. In recent years the debate has been reinvigorated by the findings of neuroscience and, for some, the notion that we have free will has finally been laid to rest. Not so, says Raymond Tallis. In his quest to reconcile our practical belief in our own agency with our theoretical doubts, Tallis advances powerful arguments for the reality of freedom. Tallis challenges the idea that the laws of nature wire us into a causally closed world that imprisons. He shows that our capacity to discover and exploit these laws is central to understanding the nature of voluntary action and to reconciling free will with our status as material beings.

Bringing his familiar verve and insight to this deep and most intriguing philosophical question, one that impacts most directly on our lives and touches on nearly every other philosophical problem – of consciousness, of time, of the nature of the natural world, and of our unique place in the cosmos – Professor Tallis takes us to the heart of what we are. By our freedom he reveals our extraordinary nature more clearly.

Professor Raymond Tallis FmedSci, FRCP, FRSA