“Nihilism, Magic, and the Value of Philosophy" - Scott Sehon, Joseph E. Merrill Professor of Philosophy Inaugural Lecture

“Nihilism, Magic, and the Value of Philosophy” - Scott Sehon, Joseph E. Merrill Professor of Philosophy Inaugural Lecture

Philosophy tries to answer some pretty hard questions: What does morality require of us? Are there objective moral truths? Do we have free will? How is the mind related to the brain? Does science provide an authoritative source of knowledge? Does God exist? On the one hand, each of us acts in our ordinary life in ways that implicitly presuppose that we know the answers. On the other hand, when we attempt to address the questions directly, we find ourselves in a morass of complex and interrelated issues that can seem almost impossible to resolve. One set of answers seems to commit us to a kind of unscientific magic. A more skeptical approach threatens to collapse into a nihilistic abyss in which nothing makes sense, even the scientific worldview that we wanted to save by avoiding magic. Philosophers attempt to find a comfortable middle ground between the extremes, but it is not clear that any such position is stable.

Scott Sehon arrived at Bowdoin’s philosophy department in 1993. Much of his research concerns issues in the philosophy of mind and action, especially the question of free will. In addition to numerous articles, he has two books on those topics—Teleological Realism: Mind, Agency, and Explanation (MIT) and Free Will and Action Explanation: A Non-Causal, Compatibilist Account (OUP). Sehon, who earned his PhD from Princeton and his AB from Harvard, has also published articles concerning evidence and medical research, as well as philosophy of religion. His most recent book is in political philosophy, Socialism: A Logical Introduction (OUP). He is currently working on a book on the morality of abortion, coauthored with Bowdoin colleague Kristi Olson. During his limited spare time, he plays guitar, sings, and does drone photography of the Maine coast and other landscapes.

Sponsored by the Office of Stewardship.

For more information, contact Jenn Berube at jberube@bowdoin.edu or 207-725-3928.

Open to the public free of charge.

A livestream of this talk will be available on Bowdoin's live events website.