Freeing the Will from Neurophilosophy: Voluntary Action in Thomas Aquinas and Libet-Style Experiments

Abstract

This essay presents a substantive Thomist response to neurophilosophy’s main experimental challenge to free will: the Libet-style experiments on the neural antecedents of conscious voluntary actions. My response to this challenge will disclose that Thomists are rationally justified in rejecting both the conclusions of neurophilosophy skeptics of free will, and more fundamentally, the rival philosophical conceptions of voluntary action and free will that were chosen to be operationalized in these neuroscientific experiments. I show how the Thomists’ alternative conception of human action justifies a significantly different interpretation of Libet-style experiments, one which reveals the psychological phenomenon targeted by these experiments is miscategorized as a voluntary action.

Keywords

• Thomism
• Aristotelianism
• Thomas Aquinas
• Benjamin Libet
• Alasdair MacIntyre
• neuroscience