The Brain, Disease, and Free Will: Are We Responsible for Our Actions?

Following the publication of the book *La Marche du Scarabée*, Dean Jacques Touchon invites us to reflect on the brain, illness, and free will. Are we responsible for our actions?

A discussion and a book-signing session will follow the lecture.

“Are we truly free to make our own choices? Why does a beetle suddenly change direction? Why can’t some patients walk anymore even though their bodies are intact? Why do we repeat the same mistakes, the same romances, the same sufferings? And to what extent does mental illness limit our freedom?”

Drawing on forty-five years of practice in neurology and psychiatry, the author takes us on a fascinating exploration of free will. Through clinical case studies, personal memories as a physician, and dialogues with the great thinkers—from Aristotle to Spinoza, from Voltaire to Freud, from Charcot to Bergson—he sheds light on the mechanisms that guide our decisions and questions what, within each of us, falls under the realm of freedom, determinism, or the unconscious. Far from being an academic treatise, *The Beetle’s Walk* is a lively essay in which patients’ stories bring the oldest philosophical questions to life. Each clinical encounter becomes an invitation to explore the mysteries of decision-making, consciousness, madness, and human responsibility.

"A book that brings together medicine, philosophy, and humanism, and invites readers to take a fresh look at this fundamental question: Are we truly the authors of our own actions?"