Download or read book Agency Freedom and Moral Responsibility written by Andrei Buckareff and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in problems related to human agency and responsibility by philosophers and researchers in cognate disciplines. The present volume brings together original contributions by leading specialists working in this vital field of philosophical inquiry. The contents represent the state of the art of philosophical research on intentional agency, free will, and moral responsibility. The volume begins with chapters on the metaphysics of agency and moves to chapters examining various problems of luck. The final two sections have a normative focus, with the first of the two containing chapters examining issues related to responsible agency and blame and the chapters in the final section examine responsibility and relationships. This book will be of interest to researchers and students interested in both metaphysical and normative issues related to human agency.
Download or read book Agency Freedom and Moral Responsibility written by Andrei Buckareff and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in problems related to human agency and responsibility by philosophers and researchers in cognate disciplines. The present volume brings together original contributions by leading specialists working in this vital field of philosophical inquiry. The contents represent the state of the art of philosophical research on intentional agency, free will, and moral responsibility. The volume begins with chapters on the metaphysics of agency and moves to chapters examining various problems of luck. The final two sections have a normative focus, with the first of the two containing chapters examining issues related to responsible agency and blame and the chapters in the final section examine responsibility and relationships. This book will be of interest to researchers and students interested in both metaphysical and normative issues related to human agency.
Download or read book Omissions written by Randolph Clarke and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Besides acting, we often omit to do or refrain from doing certain things. Omitting and refraining are not simply special cases of action; they require their own distinctive treatment. This book offers the first comprehensive account of these phenomena, addressing questions of metaphysics, agency, and moral responsibility.
Download or read book Agency Freedom and Responsibility in the Early Heidegger written by Hans Pedersen and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book employs Heidegger’s work of the 1920s and early 1930s to develop distinctively Heideggerian accounts of agency, freedom, and responsibility, making the case that Heidegger’s thought provides a compelling alternative to the mainstream philosophical accounts of these concepts. Hans Pedersen demonstrates that Heidegger’s thought can be fruitfully used to develop a plausible alternative understanding of agency that avoids the metaphysical commitments that give rise to the standard free-will debate. The first several chapters are devoted to working out an account of the ontological structure of human agency, specifically focusing on the Heideggerian understanding of the role of mental states, causal explanations, and deliberation in human agency, arguing that action need not be understood in terms of the causal efficacy of mental states. In the following chapters, building on the prior account of agency, Pedersen develops Heideggerian accounts of freedom and responsibility. Having shown that action need not be understood causally, the Heideggerian view thereby avoids the conflict between free will and determinism that gives rise to the problem of free will and the correlative problem of responsibility.
Download or read book Determinism Freedom and Moral Responsibility written by Susanne Bobzien and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Determinism, Freedom, and Moral Responsibility brings together nine essays on determinism, freedom and moral responsibility in antiquity by Susanne Bobzien. The essays present the main ancient theories of determinism, freedom, and moral responsibility ranging from Aristotle via Epicureans and Stoics to Alexander of Aphrodisias in the third century CE. The author discusses questions about rational and autonomous human agency and their compatibility with preceding causes, external or internal; with external impediments; with divine predetermination and theological questions; with physical theories like atomism and continuum theory, and with the sciences more generally; with elements that determine character development from childhood, such as nature and nurture; with epistemic features such as ignorance of circumstances; with necessity and modal theories generally; with folk theories of fatalism; and also with questions of how human autonomous agency is related to moral development, virtue and wisdom, blame and praise. Historically unified, philosophically profound, and methodologically rigorous, Bobzien's discussions show that in classical and Hellenistic philosophy these topics were all debated without reference to freedom to do otherwise or to free will, and that the latter two notions were fully developed only later.
Download or read book Building Better Beings written by Manuel Vargas and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Manuel Vargas presents a compelling and state-of-the-art defense of moral responsibility in the face of growing philosophical and scientific skepticism about free will and accountability. He shows how we can justify our responsibility practices, and provides a normatively and naturalistically adequate account of agency, blame, and desert.
Download or read book A Minimal Libertarianism written by Christopher Evan Franklin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Christopher Evan Franklin develops and defends a novel version of event-causal libertarianism. This view is a combination of libertarianism--the view that humans sometimes act freely and that those actions are the causal upshots of nondeterministic processes--and agency reductionism--the view that the causal role of the agent in exercises of free will is exhausted by the causal role of mental states and events (e.g., desires and beliefs) involving the agent. Franklin boldly counteracts a dominant theory that has similar aims, put forth by well-known philosopher Robert Kane. Many philosophers contend that event-causal libertarians have no advantage over compatibilists when it comes to securing a distinctively valuable kind of freedom and responsibility. To Franklin, this position is mistaken. Assuming agency reductionism is true, event-causal libertarians need only adopt the most plausible compatibilist theory and add indeterminism at the proper juncture in the genesis of human action. The result is minimal event-causal libertarianism: a model of free will with the metaphysical simplicity of compatibilism and the intuitive power of libertarianism. And yet a worry remains: toward the end of the book, Franklin reconsiders his assumption of agency reductionism, arguing that this picture faces a hitherto unsolved problem. This problem, however, has nothing to do with indeterminism or determinism, or even libertarianism or compatibilism, but with how to understand the nature of the self and its role in the genesis of action. Crucially, if this problem proves unsolvable, then not only is event-causal libertarianism untenable, so also is event-causal compatibilism.
Download or read book Hegel s Theory of Responsibility written by Mark Alznauer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-02-19 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book-length treatment of a central concept in Hegel's practical philosophy - the theory of responsibility. This theory is both original and radical in its emphasis on the role and importance of social and historical conditions as a context for our actions.
Download or read book Freedom and Responsibility written by Hilary Bok and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-08 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can we reconcile the idea that we are free and responsible agents with the idea that what we do is determined according to natural laws? For centuries, philosophers have tried in different ways to show that we can. Hilary Bok takes a fresh approach here, as she seeks to show that the two ideas are compatible by drawing on the distinction between practical and theoretical reasoning. Bok argues that when we engage in practical reasoning--the kind that involves asking "what should I do?" and sifting through alternatives to find the most justifiable course of action--we have reason to hold ourselves responsible for what we do. But when we engage in theoretical reasoning--searching for causal explanations of events--we have no reason to apply concepts like freedom and responsibility. Bok contends that libertarians' arguments against "compatibilist" justifications of moral responsibility fail because they describe human actions only from the standpoint of theoretical reasoning. To establish this claim, she examines which conceptions of freedom of the will and moral responsibility are relevant to practical reasoning and shows that these conceptions are not vulnerable to many objections that libertarians have directed against compatibilists. Bok concludes that the truth or falsity of the claim that we are free and responsible agents in the sense those conceptions spell out is ultimately independent of deterministic accounts of the causes of human actions. Clearly written and powerfully argued, Freedom and Responsibility is a major addition to current debate about some of philosophy's oldest and deepest questions.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Dietrich Bonhoeffer written by Michael Mawson and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook offers an overview of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's (1906-1945) biography and intellectual context; his contributions to all areas of doctrinal theology, ethics and public life; the significance of his thought for some contemporary issues and debates; and an evaluation of some existing resources for studying Bonhoeffer.
Download or read book Contours of Agency written by Sarah Buss and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide range of philosophical essays informed by the work of Harry Frankfurt, who offers a response to each essay.
Download or read book Hard Luck written by Neil Levy and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2011-06-30 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of luck plays an important role in debates concerning free will and moral responsibility. Neil Levy presents an original account of luck and argues that it undermines our freedom and moral responsibility no matter whether determinism is true or not.
Download or read book Thomas Reid on Freedom and Morality written by William L. Rowe and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this succinct and well-written book, one of our most eminent philosophers provides a fresh reading of the view of freedom and morality developed by Thomas Reid (1710-1796). Although contemporary theorists have written extensively about the Scottish philosopher's contributions to the theory of knowledge, this is the first book-length study of his contributions to the controversy over freedom and necessity. William L. Rowe argues that Reid developed a subtle, systematic theory of moral freedom based on the idea of the human being as a free and morally responsible agent. He carefully reconstructs the theory and explores the intellectual background to Reid's views in the work of John Locke, Samuel Clarke, and Anthony Collins. Rowe develops a novel account of Reid's conception of free action and relates it to contemporary arguments that moral responsibility for an action implies the power to have done otherwise. Distilling from Reid's work a viable version of the agency theory of freedom and responsibility, he suggests how Reid's theory can be defended against the major objections—both historical and contemporary—that have been advanced against it. Blending to good effect historical and philosophical analysis, Thomas Reid on Freedom and Morality should interest philosophers, political theorists, and intellectual historians.
Download or read book Dimensions of Moral Agency written by David Boersema and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-11-10 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dimensions of Moral Agency addresses and exemplifies the multi-dimensionality of modern moral philosophy. The book is a collection of papers originally presented at the Northwest Philosophy Conference in October 2013. The papers encompass a wide variety of topics within moral philosophy, including metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics, and broadly fall within the areas of the nature of moral agency and moral agency as it is played out in particular aspects of people’s lived experiences. The papers include assessments of the contributions of historical figures, such as Aristotle, Epictetus, Confucius, Berkeley, and Descartes, as well as analyses of agency as it relates to individual and social moral issues like mental illness, the ethics of debt, prostitution, eco-consumerism, oppression, and species egalitarianism, among others. Also covered are concerns related to the nature of moral reasoning at the individual and social level, the relevance of love and emotion to moral agency, and moral responsibility and efficacy. Interwoven with these topics and issues are concerns related to what sorts of things are, or could be, moral agents and what constitutes a moral good; the possibility of the existence of moral knowledge or moral facts or moral truth; and what constitutes moral motivation and how that is, or is not, related to questions of moral justification.
Download or read book Spinoza on Human Freedom written by Matthew J. Kisner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-10 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spinoza was one of the most influential figures of the Enlightenment, but his often obscure metaphysics makes it difficult to understand the ultimate message of his philosophy. Although he regarded freedom as the fundamental goal of his ethics and politics, his theory of freedom has not received sustained, comprehensive treatment. Spinoza holds that we attain freedom by governing ourselves according to practical principles, which express many of our deepest moral commitments. Matthew J. Kisner focuses on this theory and presents an alternative picture of the ethical project driving Spinoza's philosophical system. His study of the neglected practical philosophy provides an accessible and concrete picture of what it means to live as Spinoza's ethics envisioned.
Download or read book Personal Autonomy written by James Stacey Taylor and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-01-10 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Autonomy has recently become one of the central concepts in contemporary moral philosophy and has generated much debate over its nature and value. This 2005 volume brings together essays that address the theoretical foundations of the concept of autonomy, as well as essays that investigate the relationship between autonomy and moral responsibility, freedom, political philosophy, and medical ethics. Written by some of the most prominent philosophers working in these areas, this book represents research on the nature and value of autonomy that will be essential reading for a broad swathe of philosophers as well as many psychologists.
Download or read book Free Will written by Sam Harris and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-03-06 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of The End of Faith, a thought-provoking, "brilliant and witty" (Oliver Sacks) look at the notion of free will—and the implications that it is an illusion. A belief in free will touches nearly everything that human beings value. It is difficult to think about law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, morality—as well as feelings of remorse or personal achievement—without first imagining that every person is the true source of his or her thoughts and actions. And yet the facts tell us that free will is an illusion. In this enlightening book, Sam Harris argues that this truth about the human mind does not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom, but it can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life.
