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.

Course outline

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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…

Part of the Symposium course library.