The public is invited to a special Hutton House Reception and Talk celebrating my recently published book: Human Emergence and Our Place in the Natural World
The Reception and Talk will take place on Friday, May 16th, from 4-7pm. At Hutton House, LIU Post.
There is no charge, but pre-registration is mandatory, as space is limited.
(Hutton House is located at the rear (south end) of the LIU Post campus. Enter the campus from East Entrance on Rte 25A (Northern Blvd) and take the road straight back until it ends in a parking lot. The Hutton House building is at the far west end of the lot.)
To register, contact, Karen Young, The Hutton House Lectures, LIU Post720 Northern Blvd. Brookville, NY 11548-1300; 516-299-4003; or Karen.Young@liu.edu
This book challenges the prevailing, though often unacknowledged, view among most practicing scientists and philosophers that human free will is incompatible with the natural causality that is the basic presupposition of modern science. That position is essentially based on the reductionist view of modern physics that all complex phenomena are thought to be ultimately causally explainable solely as a function of the action of their elemental constituents.
The book argues that this mainstream opinion is the appropriate logical result of an inadequate conception of the way nature works. To show this the book first details the fundamental philosophical incoherence in the prevailing scientific world view. It then justifies the critique by outlining and re-describing some key findings of modern science, and presents three related alternative aspects by which we can understand the occurrence of natural emergence. In so doing it is suggested that emergence is a pervasive phenomenon in the natural world, and that human free will is an entirely understandable development of these natural processes, when properly understood, in which humanity is appropriately seen as a natural emergent within the evolutionary processes operating in accord with natural selection.
David Sprintzen is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Long Island University.
