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A comprehensive and accessible introduction to contemporary debates on free will.
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.
Something is subject to luck if it is beyond our control. In Luck's Mischief, Haji argues that owing frequently to precluding our being able to otherwise, luck limits both the range of what is morally obligatory for us and things for which we are morally responsible.
As an advanced introduction to the challenging topic of free will, this book is designed for upper-level undergraduates interested in a comprehensive first-stop into the field’s issues and debates. It is written by two of the leading participants in those debates—a compatibilist on the issue of free will and determinism (Michael McKenna) and an incompatibilist (Derk Pereboom). These two authors achieve an admirable objectivity and clarity while still illuminating the field’s complexity and key advances. Each chapter is structured to work as one week’s primary reading in a course on free will, while more advanced courses can dip into the annotated further readings, suggested at the end of each chapter. A comprehensive bibliography as well as detailed subject and author indexes are included at the back of the book.
This book was published in 2003. This book explores an important issue within the free will debate: the relation between free will and moral responsibility. In his seminal article "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility", Harry Frankfurt launched a vigorous attack on the standard conception of that relation, questioning the claim that a person is morally responsible for what she has done only if she could have done otherwise. Since then, Frankfurt's thesis has been at the center of philosophical discussions on free will and moral responsibility. "Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities", edited by David Widerker and Michael McKenna, draws together the most recent work on Frankfurt's thesis by leading theorists in the area of free will and responsibility. As the majority of the essays appear here for the first time, "Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities" offers the newest developments in this important debate.
Reformed Christians do not believe in free will. This is a common assertion today and it is completely false. The Reformed tradition does advocate free will, just not libertarian free will. A Reformed View of Freedom: The Compatibility of Guidance Control and Reformed Theology explains how the Reformed tradition articulated its view of human freedom and moral responsibility in terms of rational spontaneity. It shows how the Reformed view of rational spontaneity is compatible with contemporary compatibilist and semi-compatibilist views, especially that of guidance control. This work addresses a number of pressing issues in the current academic climate. Is Reformed theology theological determi...
In Freedom, Teleology, and Evil Stewart Goetz defends the existence of libertarian freedom of the will. He argues that choices are essentially uncaused events with teleological explanations in the form of reasons or purposes. Because choices are uncaused events with teleological explanations, whenever agents choose they are free to choose otherwise. Given this freedom to choose otherwise, agents are morally responsible for how they choose. Thus, Goetz advocates and defends the principle of alternative possibilities which states that agents are morally responsible for a choice only if they are free to choose otherwise. Finally, given that agents have libertarian freedom, Goetz contends that this freedom is integral to the construction of a theodicy which explains why God allows evil.
Do we really have freedom to act, or are we slaves to our genes, environment or culture? Regular TPM columnist Mathew Iredale gets to grips with one of the most intractable issues in philosophy: the problem of free will. Iredale explores what it is about the free will problem that makes it so hard to resolve and argues that the only acceptable solution to the free will problem must be one that is consistent with what science tells us about the world. It is here, maintains Iredale, that too many works on free will, introductory or otherwise, fall down, by focusing only on how free will relates to determinism. Iredale shows that there are clear areas of scientific research which are directly and significantly relevant to free will in a way that does not involve determinism. Although these areas of scientific research do not allow us to solve the problem, they do allow us to separate the more plausible ideas concerning free will from the less plausible.
"This book lays out the major arguments for scepticism about moral responsibility and subjects them to sustained and penetrating critical analysis. Moral Responsibility lays out the intricate dialectic involved in these issues in a helpful and accessible way. The book goes on to suggest a way in which scepticism can be avoided, arguing that an excessive pre-eminence given to the will might lie at the root of scepticism of moral responsibility. Carlos Moya offers an alternative to scepticism, showing how a cognitive approach to moral responsibility which stresses the importance of belief would rescue our natural and centrally important faith in the reality of moral responsibility."--Jacket.
Argues that morality, meaning and value remain intact even if we are not morally responsible for our actions.