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Author : Peter Van Inwagen
Publisher : Oxford University Press on Demand
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 1983
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780198249245
Discusses the incompatibility of the concepts of free will and determinism and argues that moral responsibility needs the doctrine of free will
Author : David Foster Wallace
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2011
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780231151573
In 1962, the philosopher Richard Taylor used six commonly accepted presuppositions to imply that human beings have no control over the future. David Foster Wallace not only took issue with Taylor's methods, but also noted a semantic trick at the heart of Taylor's argument. Fate, Time, and Language presents Wallace's critique of Taylor's work. Wallace's thesis reveals his great skepticism of abstract thinking made to function as a negation of something more genuine and real. He was especially suspicious of the cerebral aestheticism of modernism and the clever gimmickry of postmodernism, which abandoned "the very old traditional human verities that have to do with spirituality and emotion and community." As Wallace rises to meet the challenge to free will presented by Taylor, we witness the developing perspective of this major novelist and his struggle to establish logical ground for his convictions. This volume, edited by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert, reproduces Taylor's original article and other works on fatalism cited by Wallace. James Ryerson's introduction connects Wallace's early philosophical work to the themes and explorations of his later fiction, and Jay Garfield supplies a critical biographical epilogue.
Author : Peter van Inwagen
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2017-03-16
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781107166509
This volume brings together van Inwagen's most significant essays in this major field, addressing key topics and including two entirely new chapters.
Author : John Martin Fischer
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2016
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780199311293
'Our Fate' collects John Martin Fischer's previously published articles on the relationship between God's foreknowledge and human freedom. The book includes a substantial new introductory essay that puts all of the chapters into a cohesive framework, and presents a bold new account of God's foreknowledge of free actions in a causally indeterministic world.
Author : Sam Harris
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 96 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2012-03-06
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781451683400
Sam Harris, bestselling author of THE END OF FAITH takes on one of today's liveliest issues: whether or not we actually have free will.
Author : John Martin Fischer
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 294 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 1995-10-09
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781557868572
The Metaphysics of Free Will provides a through statement of the major grounds for skepticism about the reality of free will and moral responsibility. The author identifies and explains the sort of control that is associated with personhood and accountability, and shows how it is consistent with causal determinism. In so doing, out view of ourselves as morally responsible agents is protected against the disturbing changes posed by science and religion.
Author : Shaun Nichols
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 199 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2015
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780199291847
Shaun Nichols offers a naturalistic, psychological account of the origins of the problem of free will. He argues that our belief in indeterminist choice is grounded in faulty inference and therefore unjustified, goes on to suggest that there is no single answer to whether free will exists, and promotes a pragmatic approach to prescriptive issues.
Author : Nomy Arpaly
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 158 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2009-08-15
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781400824502
Perhaps everything we think, feel, and do is determined, and humans--like stones or clouds--are slaves to the laws of nature. Would that be a terrible state? Philosophers who take the incompatibilist position think so, arguing that a deterministic world would be one without moral responsibility and perhaps without true love, meaningful art, and real rationality. But compatibilists and semicompatibilists argue that determinism need not worry us. As long as our actions stem, in an appropriate way, from us, or respond in some way to reasons, our actions are meaningful and can be judged on their moral (or other) merit. In this highly original work, Nomy Arpaly argues that a deterministic world does not preclude moral responsibility, rationality, and love--in short, meaningful lives--but that there would still be something lamentable about a deterministic world. A person may respond well to reasons, and her actions may faithfully reflect her true self or values, but she may still feel that she is not free. Arpaly argues that compatibilists and semicompatibilists are wrong to dismiss this feeling--for which there are no philosophical consolations--as philosophically irrelevant. On the way to this bittersweet conclusion, Arpaly sets forth surprising theories about acting for reasons, the widely accepted idea that "ought implies can," moral blame, and more.
Author : William Myers
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2019-01-03
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780429639333
First published in 1987. Milton and Free Will is an incisive, ambitious and comprehensive analysis and defence of the concept of free will, using Milton as an example and exemplar. Written with passion, and out of a lifelong engagement with the poetry of Milton and the philosophical and theological problems it encompasses, the book will illuminate both Milton studies and philosophical debate. The author engages with all the major currents of the free will debate, starting with Aristotle and Aquinas and considering arguments advanced by Hume and Kant as well as those of a number of modern philosophers including Polanyi, Kenny, Parfit, Plantinga, Swinburne, Dennett and Davidson. He pays particular attention to the Marxist formalism of Bakhtin, the Catholic phenomenology of Pope John Paul II and the evolutionism of Monod and Sober. He concludes with a rebuttal of the deconstructionism of Barthes, Derrida and Foucault. He claims that all the major difficulties faced by defenders of free will can be overcome if a notion of willing implicit in the work of Milton is properly understood. Freedom as Milton represented and understood it, he suggests, is a condition of mind arising out of inter-personal awareness and not a property or consequence of practical reasoning. He finds supporting evidence for this view in the writings of Newman and in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, which he reads as a narrative structurally reversing Milton’s representation of the fall of Eve in Paradise Lost. The author systematically analyses and reanalyses key passages in his texts in the light of the many arguments for and against free will, seeking thereby to affirm the validity in principle, and the personal and political importance in practice, of the Christian humanist tradition of which he sees Milton, Newman and the Pope as important (if sometimes misleading) spokesmen.
Author : Dr Pedro Alexis Tabensky
Publisher : Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2012-10-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781409485124
This collection embodies a debate that explores what could be characterised as the tension between judging and understanding. It seems that after a particular threshold of understanding of the basic facts leading to a given moral transgression, the more we understand the context and motives leading to crime, the more likely we are to abstain from harsh retributive judgement. Martha Nussbaum’s essay ‘Equity and Mercy’, included in this collection, is the philosophical starting point of this debate, and Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Reader - a novel exploring the tension between judging and understanding, among other things - is used as a case study by most contributors. Some contributors, situated at one end of the spectrum of views represented in this collection, argue for the wholesale elimination of our practices of retribution in the light of the tension between judging and understanding, while contributors on the other side of the spectrum argue that the tension does not actually exist. A whole array of intermediate positions, including Nussbaum’s, are represented. This anthology is comprised of nearly all specially commissioned essays bringing together work dealing with the moral, metaphysical, epistemological and phenomenological issues required for properly understanding whether in fact there is a tension between judging and understanding and what the moral and legal implications may be of accepting or rejecting this tension.
Author : Clifford Williams
Publisher : Hackett Publishing
Page : 92 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 1980-01-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0915144778
"Nicely conceived, very clearly written. . . . A high level of philosophic substance and sophistication." --David M. Mowry, SUNY at Plattsburgh
Author : Daniel Cohen,Nick Trakakis
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2009-05-05
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781443810760
The problem of free will has fascinated philosophers since ancient times: Do we have free will, or at least the kind of free will that seems necessary for moral responsibility? Does determinism – the idea that everything that happens is necessitated to happen, given the past and the laws of nature – threaten the commonly held assumption that we are indeed free and morally responsible? Although these questions have been widely discussed in the past, the present volume offers a variety of new perspectives from philosophers who have made significant contributions to this debate over recent years, including Derk Pereboom, Robert Kane, Ishtiyaque Haji, Michael McKenna, John Martin Fischer, David Widerker and Saul Smilansky. The emphasis in these essays is not merely on free will, but on allied notions such as moral responsibility, moral obligation, fairness and meaningfulness, and on whether any room can be made for these notions in a deterministic or an indeterministic universe.
Author : John Martin Fischer,Robert Kane,Derk Pereboom,Manuel Vargas
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2009-02-04
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781405182041
Focusing on the concepts and interactions of free will, moralresponsibility, and determinism, this text represents the mostup-to-date account of the four major positions in the free willdebate. Four serious and well-known philosophers explore the opposingviewpoints of libertarianism, compatibilism, hard incompatibilism,and revisionism The first half of the book contains each philosopher’sexplanation of his particular view; the second half allows them todirectly respond to each other’s arguments, in a lively andengaging conversation Offers the reader a one of a kind, interactive discussion Forms part of the acclaimed Great Debates in Philosophyseries
Author : David Palmer (Professor)
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2014
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780199860081
This title provides a collection of essays on the libertarian position on free will and related issues that focus specifically on the views of philosopher Robert Kane. Written by a distinguished group of philosophers, the essays range from various areas of philosophy, including metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of mind.
Author : Meghan Griffith
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 162 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2013
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780415562195
The question of whether humans are free to make their own decisions has long been debated and it continues to be a controversial topic today. In Free Will: The Basics readers are provided with a clear and accessible introduction to this central but challenging philosophical problem. The questions which are discussed include: Does free will exist? Or is it illusory? Can we be free even if everything is determined by a chain of causes? If our actions are not determined, does this mean they are just random or a matter of luck? In order to have the kind of freedom required for moral responsibility, must we have alternatives? What can recent developments in science tell us about the existence of free will? Because these questions are discussed without prejudicing one view over others and all technical terminology is clearly explained, this book is an ideal introduction to free will for the uninitiated.