Three critics of Freedom Evolves (Dennett 2003) bring out important differences in philosophical outlook and method. Mele's thought experiments are supposed to expose the importance, for autonomy, of personal history, but they depend on the dubious invocation of mere logical or conceptual possibility. Fischer defends the Basic Argument for incompatibilism, while Taylor and I choose to sidestep it instead of disposing of it. Where does the burden of proof lie? O'Connor's candid expression of allegiance to traditional ideas that I (...) reject highlights a fundamental difference in assumptions about how—and why—to do philosophy. There are indeed definable varieties of free will that are incompatible with determinism. Do they matter? I have argued, against philosophical tradition, that they don't. (shrink)

The following analysis seeks to question Rousseau's assumptions concerning the desirability of an �education from things�. In particular, I will focus on the problematic relationship between, on one hand, the development of Emile's sense of freedom and independence, and on the other, his sense of moral autonomy. It is my contention that moral development necessarily entails both what Rousseau provides, namely a well-developed conception of individuality, and something that is sorely lacking in Rousseau's project. Turning to an analysis of (...) the preceptor's role in Emile's education, I will argue that it is precisely this type of connection and commitment to other human beings that Emile's education fails to foster. Ultimately, Emile emerges from his education prepared to deal with other humans on one level, but woefully lacking in other skills that are necessary for moral personhood. (shrink)

In the first study to examine F. W. J. Schelling's political thought, Velimir Stojkovski not only unearths a neglected dimension of the influential thinker's philosophy but further shows what it can teach us about our ethical and political responsibilities today. Unlike Hegel or Fichte, Schelling never wrote a political treatise. Yet by reconstructing the portions of such works as The New Deductions of Natural Right that deal explicitly with the political and by thematically rethinking parts of his writings that (...) have a clear repercussion on politics - in particular those on nature, freedom and religion - this book reveals the centrality of politics to his oeuvre. Revisiting his corpus in this way, Stojkovski uncovers a number of ways we can learn from Schelling and his reception. He examines how Schelling's views on nature can clarify our moral and political obligations to the non-human world and further demonstrates how the separation of ontology as first philosophy from the ethico-political has resulted in a fragmented view of the status of the political subject and thus the body politic. Forcefully renouncing this fragmentation, Stojkovski explores how the same divide has contributed to the ongoing political turmoil in Europe and America. Combining an exploration of German Idealism with contemporary concerns, this is an essential study that will introduce readers to a new Schelling: a political thinker for the 21st century. (shrink)

This book offers a cutting-edge interpretation of the philosophy of F.W.J. Schelling by critically reconsidering the interpretations of some of his "successors". It argues that Schelling's philosophy should be read as an ontology of immanence, highlighting its relevance for ongoing debates on ethics and freedom. The book builds on a key notion from Schelling's Philosophy of Revelation where he outlines the process through which transcendence must return to immanence in order to be grasped and understood. The author identifies Jaspers, (...) Heidegger, and Deleuze as the main interpreters of Schelling's philosophical activity, highlighting their relevance for subsequent Schelling scholarship. Heidegger and Jaspers refer to Schelling's philosophy in negative terms, namely as an incomplete and unviable philosophical system, whereas Deleuze holds the immanent core of Schelling's ontological discourse in high regard. The author's analysis demonstrates that reading Schelling's philosophy as an ontology of immanence not only avoids Heidegger's and Jaspers's criticisms but is also more fitting to Schelling's original meaning. Accordingly, his reading allows us to fully grasp Schelling's thought in all its strength and consistency: as a philosophy that avoids metaphysical abstractions and maintains the concreteness of concepts like God, nature, freedom by binding them to a solid and material account of Being. Finally, the author uses Schelling to propose an innovative reading of freedom as a matter of resistance, and of philosophy as an activity whose main purpose is that of seeking the actual extent and place of (human) life and freedom within nature. The author originally emphasises the relevance of these conclusions on contemporary debates in Postcolonial Critical Theory and Environmental Ethics. Schelling, Freedom, and the Immanent Made Transcendent. From Philosophy of Nature to Environmental Ethics will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in 19th-century Continental philosophy, German idealism, and Postcolonial Critical Theory and Environmental Ethics. (shrink)

The paper examines Robert Filmer’s arguments in defence of the divine right of kings in Patriarcha, or The Natural Power of Kings. Filmer argues that human beings are not born free by nature and, as a result, are expected to obey the kings/monarchs absolutely with­out questioning, due to the arbitrary power and the divine right bestowed upon the kings. This position defended by Filmer is antithetical to the notion of natural freedom of mankind defended by John Locke (...) and other social contract theorists. Contrary to Filmer’s view, this paper suggests that Filmer exaggerated the power of kings. In this paper, I wish to critically examine Filmer’s arguments with which he supported his claim. The paper argues against Filmer’s divine right monarchy for the following reasons: (i) it lacks rational justification, (ii) it was founded on misinterpretation of the scriptures, and (iii) it fails to address the athe­ists’ question. In the final analysis, the paper concludes with the argument that the question of mutual exclusivity of the concepts in the discussion rests upon manifest misinterpreta­tions of divine right and the natural freedom of mankind. (shrink)

Unable to reconcile freedom of choice and the inexorable limitations of nature, common sense successively affirms a false unlimited and unsituated freedom, and a false determination of man by nature which reduces him to an object. On the ...

The revival of Leibniz studies in the past twenty-five years has cast important new light on both the context and content of Leibniz's philosophical thought. Where earlier English-language scholarship understood Leibniz's philosophy as issuing from his preoccupations with logic and language, recent work has recommended an account on which theological, ethical, and metaphysical themes figure centrally in Leibniz's thought throughout his career. The significance of these themes to the development of Leibniz's philosophy is the subject of increasing attention by philosophers (...) and historians. This collection of new essays by a distinguished group of scholars offers an up-to-date overview of the current state of Leibniz research. In focusing on nature and freedom, the volume revisits two key topics in Leibniz's thought, on which he engaged both contemporary and historical arguments. Important contributions to Leibniz scholarship in their own right, these articles collectively provide readers a framework in which to better situate Leibniz's distinctive philosophy of nature and the congenial home for a morally significant freedom that he took it to provide. (shrink)

Surprisingly, over the decade or so since its publication, Bhaskar's Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom has received relatively little in the way of systematic analysis either by critical realists or their critics. There have been, however, a number of critiques that have dealt with some of its themes and developments in a variety of contexts. In the following study, I assess the argument of Alex Callinicos. Callinicos' critique, though in many ways sympathetic, is fundamental to critical realism. Engaging with (...) it provides a means to develop and clarify a number of arguments about aspects of critical realism in general and also provides a useful staging point to set forth a basic and consistent ordering of inquiry for a critique of DPF. The initial purpose of the analysis is not so much a defence of DPF but an assessment of the construction of an argument brought to bear on it. I argue that the form of the argument deployed is problematic in a way that detracts from the substance of the critique of the content of DPF. This is not to suggest that DPF is immune to criticism but rather to suggest that a fuller analysis of the DPF argument and its potential remains to be made. The ultimate purpose of the analysis is to use this assessment of a strategy of critique—an argumentation schema or discursive form—to create an alternative approach to critically appraising DPF. Fundamental to Callinicos' argument is the nature of transcendental argument. (shrink)

The German philosopher Robert Spaemann provides an important contribution to a number of contemporary debates in philosophy and theology, opening up possibilities for conversation between these disciplines. He engages in a dialogue with classical and contemporary positions and often formulates important and original insights which lie beyond common alternatives. In this study Holger Zaborowski provides an analysis of the most important features of Spaemann's philosophy and shows the unity of his thought. The question 'Who is a person?' is of increasing (...) significance: Are all human beings persons? Are there animals that can be considered persons? What does it mean to speak of personal identity and of the dignity of the person? Spaemann provides an answer to these questions: Every human being, he argues, is a person and, therefore, 'has' his nature in freedom. In order to understand the person, Spaemann explains, we have to think about the relation between nature and freedom and avoid the reductive accounts of this relation prevalent in important strands of modern thought. Spaemann develops a challenging critique of modernity, incorporating analysis of modern anti-modernisms and showing that these are also subject to a dialectical development, perpetuating the problematic shortcomings of many features of modern reasoning. If we do not want to abolish ourselves as persons, Spaemann reasons, we need to find a way of understanding ourselves that evades the dialectic of modernity. Thus, he reminds his readers of 'self-evident' knowledge: insights that we have once already known, but tend to forget. (shrink)

In this paper I present an interpretation of J. G. Fichte's transcendental argument for the necessity of mutual recognition in Foundations of Natural Right. Fichte's argument purports to show that, as a condition of the possibility of self-consciousness, we must take ourselves to stand in relations of mutual recognition with other agents like ourselves. After reconstructing the steps of Fichte's argument, I present what I call the ‘modal dilemma’, which highlights a serious ambiguity in Fichte's deduction. According to the (...) modal dilemma, the conclusion to Fichte's transcendental argument—that as a condition of the possibility of our self-consciousness, we must recognize and be recognized by others—expresses either metaphysical or normative necessity. However, no normative conclusion follows from Fichte's premises, and the metaphysical claim that does follow from his argument appears to be implausibly strong. Thus the argument looks like a failure on either interpretation of the conclusion's modality. In the penultimate section of the paper, I propose a new interpretation of the argument that avoids the modal dilemma and provides a normative grounding of Fichte's concept of right. (shrink)

I provide a novel response to scepticism concerning freedom and moral responsibility. This involves my extension to freedom of John McDowell's liberal natural approach to ethics and epistemology. I trace the source of the sceptical problem to an overly restrictive, brute conception of nature, where reality is equated with what figures, directly or indirectly, in natural scientific explanation. I challenge the all encompassing explanatory pretensions of restrictive naturalism, advocating a re-conception of nature such that it already (...) incorporates reasons. This allows for an explanation of free actions which is not ultimately brute, but irreducibly normative. Against the backdrop of liberal naturalism I conceive freedom as an emergent capacity to respond to reasons which arises from the acquisition of language. I claim that freedom is a rational causal power to originate actions based within a naturalised ontology, which has sufficient depth to justify moral responsibility without begging ontological or epistemological questions. (shrink)

The article discusses the link between freedom, crime and punishment. According to some theorists, crime does not only cause a person to have less freedom; it constitutes, _in and of itself_, a breach of the freedom of others. Punishment does not only cause people to have more freedom, for instance by preventing crimes; it constitutes, _in and of itself_, respect for mutual freedom. If the latter claims are true, crime and punishment must have certain _meanings_ (...) that make them denials/affirmations of freedom irrespective of their consequences. My aim is to show that such an immanent connection between crime/punishment and freedom exists. I do so by explicating the “natural meaning” of crime and punishment. This way of addressing the topic is inspired by Jean Hampton’s use of H. P. Grice’s concept of natural meaning. Expanding on Hampton’s theory, drawing on both H. L. A. Hart and Kant, I argue that crime has the natural meaning of denying freedom, and punishment has the natural meaning of affirming freedom. The paper presents an ideal theory, not a justification for actual criminal justice practices, which in most countries unfortunately fail to instantiate the value of mutual freedom. (shrink)

Kant’s account of “the radical evil in human nature” in the 1793 Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone is typically interpreted as a reworking of the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. But Kant doesn’t talk about Augustine explicitly there, and if he is rehabilitating the doctrine of original sin, the result is not obviously Augustinian. Instead Kant talks about Stoic ethics in a pair of passages on either end of his account of radical evil, and leaves other clues that (...) his argument is a reworking of an old Stoic problem. “Radical evil” refers to the idea that our moral condition is — by default and yet by our own deed — bad or corrupt; and that this corruption is the root (radix) of human badness in all its variety, ubiquity, and sheer ordinariness. Kant takes as his premise a version of the Stoic idea that nature gives us “uncorrupted starting points” (Diogenes Laertius 7.89). What sense can be made of the origin of human badness, given such a premise? Kant’s account of radical evil is an answer to this old Stoic problem, which requires a conception of freedom that is not available in his Stoic sources. (shrink)

Academic freedom does not refer to freedom to engage in any speech act, but to freedom to hold any belief and espouse it in an appropriately academic manner. This freedom belongs to certain institutions, rather than to individuals, because of their academic nature. Academic freedom should be absolute, regardless of any offence it may on occasion cause.

Schelling is often thought to be a protean thinker whose work is difficult to approach or interpret. Devin Zane Shaw shows that the philosophy of art is the guiding thread to understanding Schelling's philosophical development from his early works in 1795-1796 through his theological turn in 1809-1810. -/- Schelling's philosophy of art is the 'keystone' of the system; it unifies his idea of freedom and his philosophy of nature. Schelling's idea of freedom is developed through a critique of (...) the formalism of Kant's and Fichte's practical philosophies, and his nature-philosophy is developed to show how subjectivity and objectivity emerge from a common source in nature. The philosophy of art plays a dual role in the system. First, Schelling argues that artistic activity produces through the artwork a sensible realization of the ideas of philosophy. Second, he argues that artistic production creates the possibility of a new mythology that can overcome the socio-political divisions that structure the relationships between individuals and society. Shaw's careful analysis shows how art, for Schelling, is the highest expression of human freedom. (shrink)

The topic of this dissertation is the concept of nature and how Kant and Hegel each conceive of it. Both agree that <nature> cannot be an empirical concept but is rather presupposed in all experience and object-related thinking. Yet, Kant holds that we can only conceive of nature as a unified whole when we conceive of it as a mechanical system. Whereas, according to Hegel, the unity of all the different kinds of natural phenomena can only be accounted for (...) by means of his dialectical method. A crucial and novel point in my reading of Kant is that the concept of nature as a mechanical system is merely a regulative ideal, i.e., an imaginary end-point of science that we only approach asymptotically. It is this point that allows me to resolve long-standing puzzles in the scholarship regarding organisms and free will. For this point allows for a coherent reading of Kant, a reading that involves that 1) we do in fact have experience of organisms as purposive and that 2) Kant’s distinctive kind of determinism is compatible with an open future. My reading of Kant furthermore provides a uniquely suited entry-point into Hegel’s dialectical account of nature, according to which not only human beings and organisms, but even solar systems do not fit the mould of a flat-footed mechanical determinism. This allows me to show that Hegel is—in several respects—both an inheritor and radicalizer of Kant. (shrink)

Many countries around the world embrace freedom and democracy as part of their political culture. However, culture is at least in part a human response to the ecological challenges that a society faces; hence, it should not be surprising that the degree to which societies regulate the level of individual freedom is related to environmental circumstances. Previous research suggests that levels of societal freedom across countries are systematically related to three types of ecological threats: prevalence of pathogens, (...) climate challenges, and natural disaster threat. Though their incidence overlaps, the literature has not yet provided a competitive test. Drawing upon the ecocultural framework, we tested five rival hypotheses, alternately focused on the above ecological factors and their interactions with economic wealth in explaining country variations in socio-political freedom. Focusing on data from 150 countries, we performed a series of linear mixed-effects regressions predicting freedom in the domains of politics, media, and economy. We found that countries with higher pathogen prevalence were more likely to suppress democracy and media freedom. Economic wealth, however, moderated the effect of pathogen prevalence on economic freedom, with the main effect being only found among wealthy countries, but not among poor countries. In contrast, natural disaster threat predicted political freedom and press freedom only among poor countries, consistent with the idea that disaster threat accompanied by poor resources promote socio-political freedom as a means of increasing collective survival. Throughout our analyses, we found no support for hypotheses based on climatic challenges. In addition, our multilevel approach revealed that country scores for socio-political freedom were highly clustered within world regions, accounting for substantial portions of variance. Overall, the present research offers a nuanced view of the interplay between ecology and wealth in the emergence of socio-political freedom. We discuss new directions in future research considering methodological and theoretical contributions of the present findings. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that, despite his remarks to the effect that freedom consists in the ‘movement’ away from nature, Hegel conceives of the will as a natural power or capacity of sorts. I articulate and defend this thesis in two steps. In section I of the paper, I sketch a reading of Hegel’s account of practical freedom in the Introduction to the Philosophy of Right as a capacity to respond to ethical requirements or duties. In (...) section II, I argue that the will, on that account, qualifies for Hegel as natural in the following two respects: First, in the good or virtuous case, our responsiveness to ethical requirements exhibits features similar to the lawlike behavior of subhuman denizens of the natural world and other law-governed natural processes. Second, our capacity for practical freedom emerges through processes of habituation from the exercises of capacities that we share with other animals. Although the second thesis is the more important of the two for the purposes of naturalizing Hegel’s account of the will, I believe it has not yet been the focus of satisfactory scholarly attention. I thus hope to help remedy what I take to be a gap in the recent literature. Published on 2022-10-14 10:55:29. (shrink)

Anselm of Canterbury is the first Christian philosopher, perhaps the first philosopher, to offer a systematic analysis of libertarian freedom. His work prefigures that of Robert Kane, and looking at the two philosophers together is helpful in understanding and appreciating the work of each of them. In this paper I show how Anselm adopts a view of choice that foreshadows Kane’s doctrine of ‘plural voluntary control.’ Kane proposes this doctrine as an attempt to answer the ‘luck’ problem. Alfred Mele (...) criticizes this approach, arguing that, unless the agent’s competing desires ultimately originate with the agent himself, he cannotbe considered autonomous. It is true that on both Kane’s and Anselm’s analysis, agents have only a limited area of autonomy. However, an appreciation of theradical implications of this limited autonomy in Anselm’s system shows that plural voluntary control gives the agent significant freedom. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nature and Freedom, Purity and Impurity in Reconsidering the Life of PowerJames Garrison (bio)My book Reconsidering the Life of Power: Ritual, Body, and Art in Critical Theory and Chinese Philosophy is not so much about providing a systematic account of what it means to be a self-monitoring, self-regulating subject, the branches of which might resolve down to some single root, despite its clear debt to Judith Butler's 1997 (...) The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection.1 My book is instead more self-consciously rhizomatic in the [End Page 833] manner of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.2 Describing my rhizomatic approach in this book, Joseph Harroff observes in his preceding article that:Instead of thinking about thinking as being conducive to the construction of totalizing systems, final vocabularies, or epistemic closure, Garrison connects our embodied reflection in the interstices of habit to the always changing life of power—that is, the conditions for the possibility of becoming a thinking, feeling, body-subject—to the dynamic and amorphous nature of the multitudinous processes by which we are constantly being rendered subjectival in daily life by forces working relatively synchronically in the present as "subjectivation" and relatively diachronically in cultural traditions as so many forms of "subjectality"3This is a very nuanced way of saying that my efforts to present subject life as being (1) relational, (2) bodily, (3) discursive, and (4) ritually philosophy. Indeed, thoughmpelled have led to a book that sprawls.4 This sprawl is thus like that of a rhizome (think of ginger), not proceeding from a single source of growth with a single, clear arche. Do I revel in the imprecision? Yes, but only when it is justified by the investigation itself. And in the case of this inquiry—which spans what Judith Butler captures regarding ritual performativity by drawing on figures like Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, and Foucault and the complex approaches to ritual seen in classical and contemporary Rú 儒 philosophy (Confucianism)—the rhizomatic approach very much is.With my book having hopefully earned its own rhizomatic badge of honor, my response to the thoughtful questions posed by Kelly Coble and Joseph Harroff likewise takes up this spirit and cuts its own course through what has been presented in their articles. Hence, I will proceed in a non-linear fashion that draws links between ideas capriciously and unapologetically.That said, my way of looking at Reconsidering the Life of Power and what I immodestly call its insights is far from the only perspective. I hold a copyright on the book (fact check: ctually, it's SUNY Press), but in the marketplace of ideas, I hold no monopoly, even over what I have authored. Therefore, while I feel a degree of ownership over the ideas presented here, I am delighted to see my thinking challenged and extended by people like Kelly Coble and Joseph Harroff in this forum and by others (like Michael J. Ardoline in the article "Building a Way: Becoming Active in One's Own Subjectivation through Deleuze and Xunzi" from the journal Philosophies),5 all of whom see so much present in the text beyond what I, even in its conception, was able.To wit, Joseph Harroff's characterization of my efforts to reclaim and redefine the term "liberal arts" captures so much of what I tried to convey so much more succinctly and with so much more in the way of provocative connection to a wealth of texts of a decidedly European lineage on the connection between freedom, the arts, and self-cultivation.6 However, as he well identifies, whereas classical European conceptions of liberal arts tend to [End Page 834] be more about self-cultivation of an atomic individual, what I am offering is more about finding freedom while taking the "self" in question to be deeply and constitutively relational along the lines that he very effectively links to the pragmatism of John Dewey and also in Rú, philosophy. Indeed, though not much of this specific pragmatist thread made it directly into this book, the influence of Roger T. Ames from my time at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa pervades Reconsidering the Life... (shrink)

Hume's influential treatment of liberty and necessity has traditionally been understood as a statement of what might be termed the classical compatibilist position. On this view, articulated by empiricists from Hobbes to Schlick, analysis of the concepts of freedom and causal necessity reveals that moral responsibility is consistent with—indeed, requires—the causal determination of voluntary actions. It is not difficult to see why Hume, too, has been counted in this camp: as it appears familiarly in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, (...) "Of Liberty and Necessity" begins by declaring the long-disputed question of free will to be a merely verbal controversy that a few intelligible definitions should put to rest. In this noteworthy and provocative book, Paul Russell rejects the standard interpretation of Hume as a classical compatibilist. (shrink)

The present paper is an attempt to show that Kolakowski's contention is fundamentally correct. But Part I begins by distinguishing, as here he does not, two very different senses of ‘freedom’. In one freedom is a possible but not a necessary condition and objective of human activity: it is a condition which may or may not obtain on particular occasions; and an objective which particular people may or may not choose to pursue. In the other freedom is (...) indeed inescapably ‘rooted in the very quality of being human’. So the remainder of Part I is devoted to the elucidation of this second sense, and to showing that any study of human behaviour which is to deserve the diploma description ‘science’ must start by recognizing rather than denying this definitive fact of our nature. It is argued that no one would be able even to understand such a denial unless they were equipped with premises sufficient for a demonstration of its falsity. Part II goes on to make an example of a widely read work by a leading behavioural scientist. The author starts by insisting, contrary to the contentions of Part I, that any true science of human psychology must presuppose the truth of that denial. He then proceeds to make it clear that, in consequence, he himself places no value upon freedom in the first sense. (shrink)

For there is a struggle for human freedom to be waged not only against external centers of irresponsible power but against those equally irresponsible internal forces which in varying degrees dominate the mind and heart of every man. Because of them, man may be free politically and economically, yet deeply enslaved. He can be free of all arbitrary external controls, yet live under the power ol internal compulsions which make of him an automaton: insatiable in his needs, inflexible in (...) his methods, and incapable of learning intellectually or of maturing emotionally through experience. Because of these inner processes, man may be an absolute monarch or a constitutionally elected president, an abstract artist or a precise scientist, a criminal or a clergyman, yet not possess the greatest of all freedoms–the freedom to change.1. (shrink)

The essays in this volume, including two published here for the first time, explore various aspects ofKant's conception of the system of nature, the system of ...

The Role and Nature of Freedom in Two Normative Theories of Democracy The article examines the role and the nature of freedom in two normative concepts of democracy, in the work of Hans Kelsen and of Emanuel Rádl. Both authors wrote their work on democracy between the two world wars. Kelsen formulated his concept of democracy in On the Substance and Value of Democracy (1920), a book which has clearly been influenced by the political thinking of Kant and (...) Rousseau. Kelsen shares Rousseau's idea of general will and on this basis the principle of majority. Rádl outlines his theory of freedom and democracy in The War between the Czechs and the Germans (1928), Nationality as a Scientific Problem (1929) and On German Revolution (1933). Rádl distinguishes between three types of freedom and democracy: natural, majority and contractual. Rádl asserts that only in the third type of freedom, in which freedom is connected with responsibility and the law is freedom true. He considers the first type of freedom to be anarchical freedom, which can easily be misused. The second type of freedom is better than the first, but worse than the third. The author compares these concepts of freedom and democracy then and today and shows how they are linked to the questions of justice and solidarity at national and cosmopolitan levels. (shrink)

This volume, the first part of Paul Ricoeur's Philosophy of the Will, is an eidetics, carried out within carefully imposed phenomenological brackets. It seeks to deal with the essential structure of man's being in the world, and so it suspends the distorting dimensions of existence, the bondage of passion, and the vision of innocence, to which Ricoeur returns in his later writings. The result is a conception of man as an incarnate Cogito, which can make the polar unity of subject (...) and object intelligible and provide a basic continuity for the various aspects of inquiry into man's being-in-the-world. (shrink)

In this book, Russell examines Hume's notion of free will and moral responsibility. It is widely held that Hume presents us with a classic statement of a compatibilist position--that freedom and responsibility can be reconciled with causation and, indeed, actually require it. Russell argues that this is a distortion of Hume's view, because it overlooks the crucial role of moral sentiment in Hume's picture of human nature. Hume was concerned to describe the regular mechanisms which generate moral sentiments such (...) as responsibility, and Russell argues that his conception of free will must be interprted within this naturalistic framework. He goes on to discuss Hume's views about the nature and character of moral sentiment; the extent to which we have control over our moral character; and the justification of punishment. Throughout, Russell argues that the naturalistic avenue of interpretation of Hume's thought, far from draining it of its contemporary interest and significance, reveals it to be of great relevance to the ongoing contemporary debate - particuarly in relation to the views of P.F. Strawson and his influential paper "Freedom and Resentment". (shrink)

Kant's Critique of Judgment seems not to be an obviously unified work. Unlike other attempts to comprehend it as a unity, which treat it as serving either practical or theoretical interests, Kristi Sweet's book posits it as examining a genuinely independent sphere of human life. In her in-depth account of Kant's Critical philosophical system, Sweet argues that the Critique addresses the question: for what may I hope? The answer is given in Kant's account of 'territory,' a region of experience that (...) both underlies and mediates between freedom and nature. Territory forms the context in which purposiveness without a purpose, the Ideal of Beauty, the sensus communis, genius and aesthetic ideas, and Kant's conception of life and proof of God are best interpreted. Encounters in this sphere are shown to refer us to a larger, more cosmic sense of a whole to which both freedom and nature belong. (shrink)

In this paper I piece together a Wittegnsteinian view of the topics indicated in my title, contrasting it with the views of Bertrand Russell and Donald Davidson ‐ two philosophers who, in words from the Blue Book, seem “constantly to see the method of science before their eyes.” I conclude that Wittegnstein helps us understand something those philosphers tend to overlook: that “freedom of the will” gets its meaning not in a belief to be assessed by evidence but, on (...) the contrary, in the expression of a way of living and assessing life that limits the role of “assessing beliefs by evidence.”. (shrink)

In drawing out the relationship between German idealism and critical theory on the question of reason’s autonomy I will concentrate on Adorno’s criticisms of transcendental idealism as it is the most sustained and detailed discussion within the critical theory tradition of the autonomy of reason. These criticisms open up for Adorno the conceptual space within which a more inclusive account reason’s autonomy might be articulated. The next section of this paper will turn to that criticism and a consideration of the (...) new theoretical direction that the critique seems to necessitate – the direction Adorno attempts – will follow. (shrink)

“Freedom” is a phenomenon in the natural world. This phenomenon—and indirectly the question of free will—is explored using a variety of systems-theoretic ideas. It is argued that freedom can emerge only in systems that are partially determined and partially random, and that freedom is a matter of degree. The paper considers types of freedom and their conditions of possibility in simple living systems and in complex living systems that have modeling subsystems. In simple living systems, (...) types of freedom include independence from fixed materiality, internal rather than external determination, activeness that is unblocked and holistic, and the capacity to choose or alter environmental constraint. In complex living systems, there is freedom in satisfaction of lower level needs that allows higher potentials to be realized. Several types of freedom also manifest in the modeling subsystems of these complex systems: in the transcending of automatism in subjective experience, in reason as instrument for passion yet also in reason ruling over passion, in independence from informational colonization by the environment, and in mobility of attention. Considering the wide range of freedoms in simple and complex living systems allows a panoramic view of this diverse and important natural phenomenon. (shrink)

Does the interaction between climactic demands, monetary resources, and freedom suggest a more general relationship between the environmental challenges that human societies face and their resources to meet those challenges? Using data on press freedom (Van de Vliert 2011a), we found no evidence of a similar interaction with natural resources (as measured by oil exports) or risk for natural disasters.