Thomas Hobbes: Causation, determinism, and their compatibility with freedom
| Abstract | _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_ | |||||||||
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Similar books and articlesJ. David Velleman (1989). Epistemic Freedom. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 70 (March):73-97.
Raymond Van Over (1974). The Psychology of Freedom. Fawcett Publications.
Coleen P. Zoller (2004). Determined but Free. Philosophy and Theology 16 (1):25-44.
Mary T. Clark (ed.) (1973). The Problem of Freedom. New York,Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Archie J. Bahm (1965). The Freedom-Determinism Controversy. Pakistan Philosophical Journal 9 (January):48-55.
Paul Crissman (1942). Freedom in Determinism. Journal of Philosophy 39 (September):520-526.
Immanuel Kant (1781). For Determinism and Indeterminism. In Critique of Pure Reason.
Keith Lehrer (ed.) (1966). Freedom and Determinism. Random House.
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