Time

Jun 14-16 2026, at 15:10

Place

Room 210, New Sun Student Center, Peking University

Speaker

Robert Pasnau, University of Colorado Boulder

Language

English

Abstract

Lecture 1. Two Theories of Self-Control

Thomas Hobbes blamed medieval scholastic philosophy for having fatally obscured the true nature of the freewill problem. In a way, he is very much correct, because the medieval approach to the problem exemplifies the understanding of self-control that Hobbes seeks to reject: the idea that we control ourselves because we have a will that can exercise second-order control over our volitions. Hobbes’s approach, however, is hardly new. Indeed, its clearest statement goes back to Augustine, at the start of the Middle Ages. In this lecture I consider how these two ways of understanding the will allow us to exercise control over ourselves.

Lecture 2. Eliminating Moral Luck

Later medieval philosophers, in stressing the role of an undetermined will in moral agency, get about as close as anyone could get to Thomas Nagel’s idea of shrinking the area of legitimate moral judgment to an extensionless point. For Nagel that was not a good thing. In this lecture I explore the way in which medieval theories of will try to remove all luck from moral appraisal.

Lecture 3. The Triumph of Moral Zeal

If the importance of an idea is measured by that idea’s influence, then the most important medieval contribution to the history of philosophy is the freewill problem. In this talk I consider why this familiar approach to the will took hold in the Middle Ages. My conclusion is that it was needed to justify the zealous attitudes toward morality that dominated medieval Christian philosophy. Those attitudes, I argue, remain with us to this day.