Online research in philosophy

Part 1. lecture 1. Free will and determinism-- the basic debate -- lecture 2. Fate and karma -- lecture 3. Divine predestination and foreknowledge -- lecture 4. Causal determinism -- lecture 5. Ancient and medieval indeterminism -- lecture 6. Agent causation -- lecture 7. Ancient and classical compatibilism -- lecture 8. Contemporary compatibilism -- lecture 9. Hard determinism -- lecture 10. Free will impossibilism -- lecture 11. The belief in free will -- lecture 12. Physics and free will --.

_What Thomas Hobbes has to say of the nature of causation itself in_ _Entire Causes_ _and Their Only Possible Effects_ _is carried further in the first of the two excerpts here_ _-- although not at its start. His second subject in this imperfectly sequential piece of_ _writing is determinism itself -- a deterministic philosophy of mind. In the mind, as_ _elsewhere, each event has a 'necessary cause' -- a cause that necessitates the event._ _His third subject in the first excerpt is freedom, this being voluntariness, and its_ _relation to the determinism. He gives a statement of what is now known as_ _Compatibilism -- roughly the doctrine that determinism and freedom properly_ _understood do not conflict with but are consistent with one another. We can be_ _entirely subject to determinism or 'necessity' and also be perfectly free. Certainly a_ _distinction between freedom as 'the absence of opposition', which can co-exist with_ _determinism, and some other kind of freedom, had been made before Hobbes. But it_ _will take a better historian than me to say if he was anticipated by someone else who_ _said that the particular freedom consistent with determinism is all that we can_ _properly mean by the term 'freedom'. Certainly he got in ahead of lovely_.

This paper looks at the main philosophic positions on free will. It suggests that the arguments for causal determinism being compatible with free will can give rise to invalid use of the term "free will". The term "freewillism" is introduced, and the differences between freewillism, determinism and libertarianism are discussed. As is the mechanism whereby freewillism supports free will. A mapping of the philosophic positions on free will to the types of causation is derived, and the evidence supporting the types of causation considered.

In the philosophical tradition, the notions of determinism and causality are strongly linked: it is assumed that in a world of deterministic laws, causality may be said to reign supreme; and in any world where the causality is strong enough, determinism must hold. I will show that these alleged linkages are based on mistakes, and in fact get things almost completely wrong. In a deterministic world that is anything like ours, there is no room for genuine causation. Though there may be stable enough macro-level regularities to serve the purposes of human agents, the sense of “causality” that can be maintained is one that will at best satisfy Humeans and pragmatists, not causal fundamentalists.

Of liberty and necessity, by D. Hume.--The doctrine of necessity examined, by C. S. Peirce.--Determinism in history, by E. Nagel.--Some arguments for free will, by T. Reid.--Has the self free will? by C. A. Campbell.--Dialogue on free will, by L. de Valla.--Can the will be caused? by C. Ginet.--Free will, by G. E. Moore.--A modal muddle, by S. N. Thomas.--Determinism, indeterminism, and libertarianism, by C. D. Broad.--An empirical disproof of determinism? by K. Lehrer.--Free will, praise and blame, by J. J. C. Smart.--Bibliographical essay.