Kategoria BISAC: Philosophy >> Free Will & Determinism

While Schelling's philosophy is less known than that of the other major German Idealists, Fichte and Hegel, he is one of the thinker with whom Heidegger has the most affinity, making this study fruitful for an...

Much contemporary scholarship on free will focuses on whether it is compatible with causal determinism. According to compatibilists, it is possible for an agent to be determined in all her choices and actions and still be free. Incompatibilists, on the other hand, think that the existence of free will is incompatible with the truth of determinism. There are two dominant general conceptions of the nature of free will. According to the first of these, free will is primarily a function of being able to do otherwise than one in fact does. On this view, free will centrally depends upon...

Alienation After Derrida rearticulates the Hegelian-Marxist theory of alienation in the light of Derrida's deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence. Simon Skempton aims to demonstrate in what way Derridian deconstruction can itself be said to be a critique of alienation. In so doing, he argues that the acceptance of Derrida's deconstructive concepts does not necessarily entail the acceptance of his interpretations of Hegel and Marx. In this way the book proposes radical reinterpretations, not only of Hegel and Marx, but of Derridian deconstruction itself.

The critique of the...

This book makes an important contribution to the history of ideas in France in the century preceding the main manifestations of the Enlightenment. A number of detailed studies already exist which deal with special aspects of the thought of the period, and works abound on individual thinkers such as Descartes and Pascal. Professor Spink, however, has endeavoured to present within a single volume a full, coherent and balanced account of the radical inquiries in literature, philosophy, and the natural sciences that stemmed from the intellectual crisis of the 1620s. He analyses the content of...

Free Will and Continental Philosophy explores the concepts of free-will and self-determination in the Continental philosophical tradition. David Rose examines the ways in which Continental philosophy offers a viable alternative to the hegemonic scientistic approach taken by analytic philosophy. Rose claims that the problem of free-will is only a problem if one makes an unnecessary assumption consistent with scientific rationalism.
In the sphere of human action we assume that, since action is a physical event, it must be reducible to the laws and concepts of science. Hence, the...

In Omissions, Randolph Clarke offers the first comprehensive account of these phenomena, addressing three main questions: What is an omission?...

In our daily life, it really seems as though we have free will, that what we do from moment to moment is determined by conscious decisions that we freely make. You get up from the couch, you go for a walk, you eat chocolate ice cream. It seems that we're in control of actions like these; if we are, then we have free will. But in recent years, some have argued that free will is an illusion. The neuroscientist (and best-selling author) Sam Harris and the late Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner, for example, claim that certain scientific findings disprove free will. In this engaging...