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.

Download or read book Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem written by Mark Balaguer and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-01-13 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument that the problem of free will boils down to an open scientific question about the causal histories of certain kinds of neural events. In this largely antimetaphysical treatment of free will and determinism, Mark Balaguer argues that the philosophical problem of free will boils down to an open scientific question about the causal histories of certain kinds of neural events. In the course of his argument, Balaguer provides a naturalistic defense of the libertarian view of free will. The metaphysical component of the problem of free will, Balaguer argues, essentially boils down to the question of whether humans possess libertarian free will. Furthermore, he argues that, contrary to the traditional wisdom, the libertarian question reduces to a question about indeterminacy—in particular, to a straightforward empirical question about whether certain neural events in our heads are causally undetermined in a certain specific way; in other words, Balaguer argues that the right kind of indeterminacy would bring with it all of the other requirements for libertarian free will. Finally, he argues that because there is no good evidence as to whether or not the relevant neural events are undetermined in the way that's required, the question of whether human beings possess libertarian free will is a wide-open empirical question.

Download or read book Why Free Will Is Real written by Christian List and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-06 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A crystal-clear, scientifically rigorous argument for the existence of free will, challenging what many scientists and scientifically minded philosophers believe. Philosophers have argued about the nature and the very existence of free will for centuries. Today, many scientists and scientifically minded commentators are skeptical that it exists, especially when it is understood to require the ability to choose between alternative possibilities. If the laws of physics govern everything that happens, they argue, then how can our choices be free? Believers in free will must be misled by habit, sentiment, or religious doctrine. Why Free Will Is Real defies scientific orthodoxy and presents a bold new defense of free will in the same naturalistic terms that are usually deployed against it. Unlike those who defend free will by giving up the idea that it requires alternative possibilities to choose from, Christian List retains this idea as central, resisting the tendency to defend free will by watering it down. He concedes that free will and its prerequisites—intentional agency, alternative possibilities, and causal control over our actions—cannot be found among the fundamental physical features of the natural world. But, he argues, that’s not where we should be looking. Free will is a “higher-level” phenomenon found at the level of psychology. It is like other phenomena that emerge from physical processes but are autonomous from them and not best understood in fundamental physical terms—like an ecosystem or the economy. When we discover it in its proper context, acknowledging that free will is real is not just scientifically respectable; it is indispensable for explaining our world.

Download or read book Free Will A Very Short Introduction written by Thomas Pink and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004-06-24 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every day we seem to make and act upon all kinds of free choices - but are these choices really free? Or are we compelled to act the way we do by factors beyond our control? This book looks at free will.

Download or read book The Question of Free Will written by Morton White and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the main philosophical puzzles is the question of free will: what is it? do we have it? how do we know we have it? In this highly original study, noted philosopher Morton White offers a novel defense of the position that we may believe in free will without denying or accepting determinism. White is especially concerned to interpret the statement that a person is free to choose to do something. If it means that not making the choice is not causally necessitated, the question arises: "Not causally necessitated by what?" Antideterminists answer: "Not causally necessitated by anything," whereas those who avoid antideterminism may answer: "Not causally necessitated by an attack of mental disease or by hypnosis." In evaluating these opposing views, White appeals to holism, which says that we do not test isolated statements but groups of statements. Moreover, he regards the statement that an obligatory choice must be free as a moral principle. With the help of these views, he shows how one's view of free choice varies with one's view of a moral excuse. He also shows convincingly why anti-determinism should be rejected in favor of an opposing theory that organizes the relevant data in a simpler way without abandoning beliefs that many of us are reluctant to surrender.

Download or read book The Freewill Question written by W.H. Davis and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the result of a discontent on my part with (r) the super ficial and offhand way many determinists set forth their arguments, without the slightest hint of the difficulties which have been raised against those arguments, and (2) the fact that the chief and best argu ments of the libertarians are scattered allover the literature and are seldom if ever brought together in one package. may be taken as an effort to gather into one place Mostly this work and to express as cogently as possible the arguments for freewill. So far as I know all of the arguments we treat have been made before. Only toward the end of this work do I attempt to elaborate a point not heretofore emphasized. That point is that freedom of the will is a concept intimately entangled with the human power to reason, so that if one of these powers goes, the other must also go. Moreover, both the will and the reason are intimately tied up with our moral sensitivities, so that no one of these phenomena is intelligible without the others. Hints of these ideas abound, of course, in the literature, and the degree of originality claimed is minimal. The interconnections, however, between these three basic concepts of the will, the reason, and the good, are of such great importance and are so usually ignored that I feel our short statement of the situation warrants the reader's sympathetic attention.

Download or read book Free Will written by Meghan Griffith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Our Fate written by John Martin Fischer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Divine Foreknowledge written by and published by . This book was released on 1842 with total page 12 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Illusion of Conscious Will written by Daniel M. Wegner and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-08-11 with total page 725 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism. Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.

Download or read book Four Views on Free Will written by John Martin Fischer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-02-04 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book The Limits of Free Will written by Paul Russell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-22 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Limits of Free Will presents influential articles by Paul Russell concerning free will and moral responsibility. The problems arising in this field of philosophy, which are deeply rooted in the history of the subject, are also intimately related to a wide range of other fields, such as law and criminology, moral psychology, theology, and, more recently, neuroscience. These articles were written and published over a period of three decades, although most have appeared in the past decade. Among the topics covered: the challenge of skepticism; moral sentiment and moral capacity; necessity and the metaphysics of causation; practical reason; free will and art; fatalism and the limits of agency; moral luck, and our metaphysical attitudes of optimism and pessimism. Some essays are primarily critical in character, presenting critiques and commentary on major works or contributions in the contemporary scene. Others are mainly constructive, aiming to develop and articulate a distinctive account of compatibilism. The general theory advanced by Russell, which he describes as a form of "critical compatibilism", rejects any form of unqualified or radical skepticism; but it also insists that a plausible compatibilism has significant and substantive implications about the limits of agency and argues that this licenses a metaphysical attitude of (modest) pessimism on this topic. While each essay is self-standing, there is nevertheless a core set of themes and issues that unite and link them together. The collection is arranged and organized in a format that enables the reader to appreciate and recognize these links and core themes.

Download or read book Free Will and Theism written by Kevin Timpe and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a systematic exploration of the relationship between religious beliefs and various accounts of free will in the contemporary domain. With a particular eye on how theological commitments might shape our views about the nature of free will, a team of leading experts in the field explores an important gap in the current debate. They focus their attention on this crucial point of intellectual intersection with surprising and illuminating results.

Download or read book An Essay on Free Will written by Peter Van Inwagen and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 1983 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the incompatibility of the concepts of free will and determinism and argues that moral responsibility needs the doctrine of free will

Download or read book Free Will and Luck written by Alfred R. Mele and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aiming to help readers think more clearly about free will, Mele identifies the conceptual obstacles to justified belief in the existence of free will. He also attempts to clarify the central issue in the philosophical debate about free will & moral responsibility, & criticizes various influential contemporary theories about free will.

Download or read book Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays written by P.F. Strawson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2008-08-28 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the time of his death in 2006, Sir Peter Strawson was regarded as one of the world's most distinguished philosophers. First published thirty years ago but long since unavailable, Freedom and Resentment collects some of Strawson's most important work and is an ideal introduction to his thinking on such topics as the philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology and aesthetics. Beginning with the title essay Freedom and Resentment, this invaluable collection is testament to the astonishing range of Strawson's thought as he discusses free will, ethics and morality, logic, the mind-body problem and aesthetics. The book is perhaps best-known for its three interrelated chapters on perception and the imagination, subjects now at the very forefront of philosophical research. This reissue includes a substantial new foreword by Paul Snowdon and a fascinating intellectual autobiography by Strawson.

Download or read book Reasonable Faith written by William Lane Craig and published by Crossway. This book was released on 2008 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This updated edition by one of the world's leading apologists presents a systematic, positive case for Christianity that reflects the latest work in the contemporary hard sciences and humanities. Brilliant and accessible.