Does Heidegger allow space for free will?
Raymond Tallis
conducts by Zoom
his eleventh Inner Circle Seminar: No. 296
introduced by Anthony Stadlen
Sunday 16 February 2025
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
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Raymond Tallis
(10 October 1946 – )
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Martin Heidegger 26 September 1899 – 26 May 1976 |
Raymond Tallis is one of our best-loved invited speakers. Today he conducts his eleventh Inner Circle Seminar (his first was on 2 December 2012).
Professor Tallis has shown in ten profound Inner Circle Seminars that he is one of the world’s leading demystifiers of what he calls the ‘neuroscience delusion’ (‘neuromania’) and the ‘intellectual plague of biologism’ (‘animalism’). His ruthless, good-humoured exposure of reductive natural-scientism continues the tradition of Heidegger and Szasz, for example, but is utterly his own. The heart of his thinking, which has informed all his more than thirty books and all the seminars he has conducted for us, is in harmony with the underlying philosophy and raison d'être of the Inner Circle Seminars as a whole. Psychotherapists are free to choose to go on pretending to be ‘validated’ by ‘neuroscience’; but their work, such as it is, sometimes radically transforming and helpful, sometimes best passed over in silence, speaks for, or against, itself, as the case may be; and no pseudo-scientific ‘validation’, or ‘invalidation’, can disguise this.
Raymond Tallis is one of the select few who affirms and advocates human language to depict and describe the human world and human relationships.
In his book Logos Professor Tallis exposes the absurdity of the argument that evolutionary biology or neuroscience show that our thinking is merely a function of our bodies-as-objects-for-science and therefore can have no truth-value of its own unless it is in some way itself derived from evolutionary biology or neuroscience, which are taken to be ‘objectively true’. But those sciences are themselves human creations, and therefore, by this argument, not ‘objectively true’. Professor Tallis remarks that those who use this argument are worthy successors of the Cretan of old who said all Cretans were liars.
Raymond Tallis introduces his seminar today as follows:
Does Heidegger Allow Space for Free Will?
In a previous seminar, I made the case for the reality of agency in the face of the currently dominant naturalist, scientistic philosophy that seemed to demonstrate its impossibility. At the heart of my defence of free will was an appeal to the distinctive nature of actions and that in virtue of which they are put together. Agents engage with the natural world from a virtual outside: their actions are the realisation of prior envisaged possibilities and of the tensed time in which possibilities are located (such that they are occasioned by an envisaged future informed by a past that is present). Actions are radically different from other material events that are propelled into being by past events which are their causal ancestors.
There is some overlap between this account of the properties of the human agent and Heidegger’s Dasein that is ‘ahead of’ and ‘cares for itself’. However, Heidegger’s resistance to addressing the question of embodiment and his desire to avoid any hint of a Cartesian dualism – so that he marginalises the body-as-object – brings problems for understanding agency. The endeavour to dissolve individuals into “being-in-the-world” makes it difficult to see how Da-sein is individuated and how, consequently, its agency has a point d’appui; in particular how its actions are located in physical space and physical time.
Heidegger’s failure to deal with embodiment (flagged up by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) is not, I shall argue, adequately addressed by his invoking a distinction between the body-as-object (Körper) and a living body open to the world (Leib). There are many reasons for claiming this but one I shall examine in some detail is the necessity for an ontological democracy between the body and the material world in order that human being should have, and pursue, an agenda that serves specific needs.
While I shall shrink from the blasphemy of accusing the Heidegger of Being and Time of even a hint of idealism, the ‘world’ in which being-in-the-world has its being seems to lack those intrinsic properties that a) transcend the human subject and b) have come into being prior to the emergence of such subjects. The permission Heidegger gives himself to start from, and remain within, a realm outside the natural world, while it may seem to deal with the challenge of determinism undermines, even empties, the very idea of an agency on account of removing any ultimate basis for Dasein to have a particular agenda. It is not surprising that his notion of freedom weakened in his later writing to Gelassenheit or authentic non-willing.
Most, if not all, Heidegger authorities will surely protest that this is a fundamental misunderstanding, so this should be an enthralling seminar!
Raymond Tallis is a philosopher, poet, novelist and cultural critic, and a retired physician and clinical neuroscientist. He ran a large clinical service in Hope Hospital Salford and an academic department in the University of Manchester. His research focussed on epilepsy, stroke, and neurological rehabilitation.
He trained in medicine at Oxford University and at St Thomas’s Hospital in London before going on to become Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester and a consultant physician. He was an editor and major contributor to two key textbooks in the field, The Clinical Neurology of Old Age and Textbook of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology, and author of over 200 original scientific articles, mainly in clinical neuroscience, including papers in Nature Medicine, Brain, Lancet. In 2000, he was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in recognition of his contribution to medical research. Among many prizes, he was awarded the Lord Cohen Gold Medal for Research into Ageing. He played a key part in developing guidelines for the care of stroke patients in the UK. From 2011-14 he was Chair, Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying (HPAD). He was a member of the Council of Royal College of Physicians between 2016 and 2019. He is a member of the criteria-setting group for the UK Research Excellence Framework 2021 in philosophy.
He has published fiction, poetry, and 30 books on the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, and literary and cultural criticism. Aping Mankind (2010) was reissued in 2016 as a Routledge Classic. Of Time and Lamentation. Reflections on Transience (2017; 2019) a comprehensive inquiry into the nature of time was widely praised. NHS SOS (2012), co-edited with Jacky Davis, examined the destructive impact of Tory policies on the NHS. Logos. An Essay on the Mystery of the Sense-Making Animal was published in Spring 2018. His most recent volume of verse – Sunburst – was published in November 2019.
A series of eight seminars on Humanism given in the philosophy department of Charles University Prague, formed the basis of his book, published in 2020, Seeing Ourselves. Reclaiming Humanity from God and Science. A defence of free will – Freedom. An Impossible Reality – was published in May 2021 and an issue of the philosophy journal Human Affairs was devoted to it. Professor Tallis has based a number of Inner Circle Seminars on these books.
His most recent books are Prague 22. A Philosopher Takes a Tram through a City’ (Philosophy Now Publications, forthcoming 2024) and Circling Round Explicitness. The Heart of the Mystery of Human Being (Acumen, 2025).
In 2009, the Economist Intelligent Life Magazine described him as one of the world’s leading polymaths. The critic Stuart Kelly said of him in Scotland on Sunday in 2016 that ‘he is one of the very few contemporary thinkers whom I would unequivocally call a genius’. He has four honorary degrees: DLitt (Hull, 1997) and Litt.D. (Manchester, 2001) for contributions to the humanities; and DSc (St George’s Hospital Medical School, 2015; University of East Anglia, 2017) for contributions to research in medicine.
For an account of how Raymond Tallis writes his extraordinary books, see his article ‘My writing day: In my favourite pub, the staff turn down the speaker in my writing corner’, in The Guardian Review of 29 April 2017:
Nicholas Fearn wrote in The Independent:
When Kirsty Young was asked to name her favourite guest on Desert Island Discs, the rock star Paul Weller was beaten into second place, for her own luxury item would be the writer Raymond Tallis.
Raymond Tallis, whose eleventh Inner Circle Seminar this will be, kindly confirms that our seminar structure, in which dialogue is of the essence, enables him to communicate and reflect on his ideas. What he values most in our seminars is that through dialogue and disagreement we hope to approach a little closer to truth. He wrote, after his first Inner Circle Seminar, The Intellectual Plague of Biologism, on 2 December 2012:
The seminar was for me an incredible experience. I have never previously had the opportunity to discuss the topics we covered in such depth with a group of people who came at it from such different angles but in a way that I found illuminating. I learned a lot. It was a tremendous privilege.
This will be an online seminar, using Zoom.
Cost: Psychotherapy trainees £140, others £175; reductions for combinations of seminars; some bursaries; no refunds or transfers unless seminar cancelled
Apply to: Anthony Stadlen, ‘Oakleigh’, 2A Alexandra Avenue, London N22 7XE
Tel: +44 (0) 7809 433250
For further information on seminars, visit: http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/
The Inner Circle Seminars were founded by Anthony Stadlen in 1996 as an ethical, existential, phenomenological search for truth in psychotherapy. They have been kindly described by Thomas Szasz as ‘Institute for Advanced Studies in the Moral Foundations of Human Decency and Helpfulness’. But they are independent of all institutes, schools, and universities.
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