Christianity changed the world for the better through the development of education, charity organisations, art, music, law and medical care among others. However, not all changes initiated by Christianity were positive. The Christian religion was also responsible for division, death, destruction and war. Focusing on the positive changes, nearly 500 years after the reformation though, it seems as if Christianity has lost its renewing and transformative powers. It seems as if society, politics and the economy are pressurising Christianity to conform (...) to the world and not the other way round. Therefore, the research focuses on the question whether Christians can bring about positive change and transformation to the current problems in society. What can Christians do to provide a religious response to current persistent societal problems? Change agents – people who drive positive change – are capable and competent, make use of networks, are visible and contactable and are often also outsiders in the communities they serve. Examples of the work done by change agents – Christians within their local communities – through small-scale community projects are showcased here to suggest possible ways forward for dealing with persistent problems from a Christian point of view. (shrink)

Christianity changed the world for the better through the development of education, charity organisations, art, music, law and medical care among others. However, not all changes initiated by Christianity were positive. The Christian religion was also responsible for division, death, destruction and war. Focusing on the positive changes, nearly 500 years after the reformation though, it seems as if Christianity has lost its renewing and transformative powers. It seems as if society, politics and the economy are pressurising Christianity to conform (...) to the world and not the other way round. Therefore, the research focuses on the question whether Christians can bring about positive change and transformation to the current problems in society. What can Christians do to provide a religious response to current persistent societal problems? Change agents - people who drive positive change - are capable and competent, make use of networks, are visible and contactable and are often also outsiders in the communities they serve. Examples of the work done by change agents - Christians within their local communities - through small-scale community projects are showcased here to suggest possible ways forward for dealing with persistent problems from a Christian point of view. (shrink)

Phenomenological foundations - The cognitive setting of the life-world - Acting in the life-world - The world of social relationships - Realms of experience - The province of sociology.

Mele develops a view of paradigmatically free actions--including decisions--as indeterministically caused by their proximal causes. He mounts a masterful defense of this thesis that includes solutions to problems about luck and control widely discussed in the literature on free will and moral responsibility.

Tackling some central problems in the philosophy of action, Mele constructs an explanatory model for intentional behavior, locating the place and significance of such mental phenomena as beliefs, desires, reasons, and intentions in the etiology of intentional action. In the first part, Mele illuminates the connection between desire and action and defends detailed characterizations of irresistible desires and reasons for action. Mele argues for the viability of a causal approach to the explanation of intentional action in terms of psychological states (...) and events, paying special attention to recent worries about the causal relevance of the mental. In Part Two, Mele goes on to develop a subtle and well-defended view that the motivational role of intentions is of a different sort from that of beliefs and desires. Mele's account, based largely on a careful study of the functions of intentions, presents intentions as states irreducible to collections of beliefs and desires which hinge on their executive and representational features. Springs of Action will be of interest not only to philosophers of action, but also to those interested in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and ethics. (shrink)

Discussions of technoscience are bringing to light that scientific journals feature very different knowledge claims. At one end of the spectrum, there is the scientific claim that a hypothesis needs to be reevaluated in light of new evidence. At the other end of the spectrum, there is the technoscientific claim that some new measure of control has been achieved in a laboratory. The latter claim has not received sufficient attention as of yet. In what sense is the achievement of control (...) genuine knowledge in its own right; how is this knowledge acquired; and publicly validated? Notions of tacit or embodied knowledge, of knowledge by acquaintance, of engineering or thing knowledge, and reconstructions of ability or skill take us only part of the way towards answering such questions. The epistemology of technoscience needs to account for the acquisition and demonstration of a public knowledge of control that does not consist in the holding of propositions, even though it is usually communicated in writing: Technoscientific knowledge is, firstly, objective and public insofar as it is exhibited and documented. Secondly, it presupposes a specific context of technology and expertise. Thirdly, it is communicable, even where the achieved capability itself is not. Knowledge of control entails, fourthly, a knowledge of causal relationships, and it sediments itself, fifthly, as a habit of action in the sense proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce. (shrink)

This article identifies and assesses a way of thinking that might help to explain why some compatibilists are attracted to what is variously called an internalist, structuralist, or anti-historicist view of moral responsibility—a view about the bearing of agents’ histories on their moral responsibility. Scenarios of two different kinds are considered. Several scenarios feature heavy-duty manipulation that radically changes an agent’s mature moral personality from admirable to despicable or vice versa. These “radical reversal” scenarios are contrasted with a scenario featuring (...) “original design”: a supernatural designer determines exactly how an agent’s life will go before the agent comes into existence. It is explained why scenarios of these two different kinds generate very different challenges to compatibilism. Partly in light of that explanation, it is argued that the way of thinking at issue is misguided. (shrink)

My question here is whether there are intentional mental actions that generate special, significant threats to causalism (i.e., threats of a kind not generated by intentional overt actions), or that generate, more poignantly, problems for causalism that some intentional overt actions allegedly generate, as well.

Herbert Gleiter promoted the development of nanostructured materials on a variety of levels. In 1981 already, he formulated research visions and produced experimental as well as theoretical results. Still he is known only to a small community of materials scientists. That this is so is itself a telling feature of the imagined community of nanoscale research. After establishing the plausibility of the claim that Herbert Gleiter provided a major impetus, a second step will show just how deeply Gleiter shaped (and (...) ceased to influence) the vision of the National Nanotechnology Initiative in the US. Finally, then, the apparent invisibility of Gleiter's importance needs to be understood. This leads to the main question of this investigation. Though materials research meets even the more stringent definitions of nanotechnology, there remains a systematic tension between materials science and the device-centered visions of nanotechnology. Though it turned the tables on the scientific prestige of physics, materials science runs up against the engineering prestige of the machine. (shrink)

Traditional libertarians about freedom of choice and action and about moral responsibility are hard-line incompatibilists. They claim that these freedoms (which they believe to be possessed by at least some human beings) are incompatible with determinism, and they take the same view of moral responsibility. I call them hard libertarians. A softer line is available to theorists who have libertarian sympathies. A theorist may leave it open that freedom of choice and action and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism but (...) may maintain that the falsity of determinism is required for more desirable species of these freedoms and for a more desirable brand of moral responsibility. This is a soft=-libertarian line. Soft libertarians would be disappointed to discover that determinism is true, but they would not conclude that no one has ever acted or chosen freely and that no one has ever been morally responsible for anything.1 In principle, a soft libertarian may or may not treat the desirability at issue in a way that relativizes it to individuals. The brand of soft libertarianism to be explored here is relativistic: it maintains that at least some human agents are possessed of kinds of freedom and moral responsibility that are incompatible with determinism and are reasonably preferred by at least some of these agents to any kind of freedom or moral responsibility that is consistent with the truth of determinism. (shrink)

This article is a critical discussion of Derk Pereboom’s “disappearing agent objection” to event-causal libertarianism in his Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life. This objection is an important plank in Pereboom’s argument for free will skepticism. It is intended to knock event-causal libertarianism, a leading pro-free-will view, out of contention. I explain why readers should not find the objection persuasive.

The Structures of the Life-World is the final focus of twenty-seven years of Alfred Schutz's labor, encompassing the fruits of his work between 1932 and his death in 1959. This book represents Schutz's seminal attempt to achieve a comprehensive grasp of the nature of social reality. Here he integrates his theory of relevance with his analysis of social structures. Thomas Luckmann, a former student of Schutz's, completed the manuscript for publication after Schutz's untimely death.

The author argued elsewhere that a necessary condition that John Fischer and Mark Ravizza offer for moral responsibility is too strong and that the sufficient conditions they offer are too weak. This article is a critical examination of their reply. Topics discussed include blameworthiness, irresistible desires, moral responsibility, reactive attitudes, and reasons responsiveness.

These original essays offer evidence that a growing number of Anglo-American philosophers are finding in the classical discussion of God's existence and nature fertile sources for critical reflection on issues in the philosophy of religion. Nelson Pike challenges Aquinas' claim that God is not responsible for evil and shows how the rejection of this claim bears on the problem of evil. Richard Swinburne defends the classical Christian understanding of heaven and hell, arguing that it is both philosophically plausible and compatible (...) with the Christian conception of God's goodness. Philip Quinn proposes a defensible version of the classical assertion that God's conserving a creature in existence is tantamount to his continuously creating that creature. Thomas Flint and Alfred Freddoso present an analysis of omnipotence which they claim to be both philosophically adequate and consonant with the orthodox Christian belief that God is both omnipotent and incapable of sinning. James Ross's main purpose is to dislodge the assumption that God's power is properly and adequately thought of as the power to cause (or bring about or actualize) states of affairs. Clement Dore reinterprets and defends Descartes' often maligned Fifth Meditation argument for God's existence. Finally, Mark Jordan explicates the metaphysical foundations of Aquinas' doctrine of divine names. (shrink)

Almost thirty years ago, in an attempt to undermine what he termed “the principle of alternate possibilities”.

In the simplest case, a proximal intention is an intention one has now to do something now. Recently, some philosophers have argued that proximal intentions do much less work than they are sometimes regarded as doing. This article rebuts these arguments, explains why the concept of proximal intentions is important for some scientific work on intentional action, and sketches an empirical approach to identifying proximal intentions. Ordinary usage of “intend” and the place of intention in folk psychology and scientific psychology (...) are discussed. (shrink)

This cutting-edge volume showcases work supported by a four-year, 4.4 million dollar project on free will and science. In fourteen new articles and an introduction, contributors explore the subject of free will from the perspectives of neuroscience; social, cognitive, and developmental psychology; and philosophy.

The “problem of present luck” targets a standard libertarian thesis about free will. It has been argued that there is an analogous problem about luck for compatibilists. This article explores similarities and differences between the alleged problems.

This article explores the conceptual connections between free action and action for which the agent is morally responsible. Questions addressed include the following. Can agents who are never morally responsible for anything sometimes act freely? Can agents who never act freely be morally responsible for some of their actions? Various compatibilist and incompatibilist responses to these questions are discussed, as is the control over their behavior that ordinary agents attribute to themselves.

According to a traditional view of self-deception, the phenomenon is an intrapersonal analogue of stereotypical interpersonal deception. In the latter case, deceiversintentionallydeceive others into believing something,p, and there is a time at which the deceivers believe thatpis false while their victims falsely believe thatpis true. If self-deception is properly understood on this model, self-deceivers intentionally deceive themselves into believing something,p, and there is a time at which they believe thatpis false while also believing thatpis true.

This article’s aim is to shed light on direct control, especially as it pertains to free will. I sketch two ways of conceiving of such control. Both sketches extend to decision making. Issues addressed include the problem of present luck and the relationship between direct control and complete control.

Midwest Studies In Philosophy, EarlyView.

This article’s point of departure is a proto-analysis that I have suggested of entering self-deception in acquiring a belief and an associated set of jointly sufficient conditions for self-deception that I have proposed. Partly with the aim of fleshing out an important member of the proposed set of conditions, I provide a sketch of my view about how self-deception happens. I then return to the proposed set of jointly sufficient conditions and offer a pair of amendments.

This article addresses two influential lines of argument for what might be termed “scientific epiphenomenalism” about conscious intentions – the thesis that neither conscious intentions nor their physical correlates are among the causes of bodily motions – and links this thesis to skepticism about free will and moral responsibility. One line of argument is based on Benjamin Libet’s neuroscientific work on free will. The other is based on a mixed bag of findings presented by social psychologist Daniel Wegner. It is (...) argued that both lines of argument are unsuccessful. (shrink)