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Topic: Free will and determinism

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	free will
		Free will is a concept in traditional philosophy used to refer to the belief that human behavior is not absolutely determined by external causes, but is the result of choices made by an act of will by the agent.
		Free will advocates, or libertarians, as they are sometimes called, believe that while everything else in the universe may be the inevitable consequence of external forces, human behavior is unique and is determined by the agent, not by God or the stars or the laws of nature.
		Determinism is compatible with ‘free will’, though the term should be abandoned to indicate that the issue is one of capacity for controlling one’s thoughts and actions.
	skepdic.com /freewill.html (1289 words)

	Determinism, Free Will, Freedom
		Determinism is the theory that all human action is caused entirely by preceding events, and not by the exercise of the Will.
		Philosophers have argued that free will is incompatible with determinism.
		Augustine, The Free Choice of the Will and On Grace and Free Will; B Holbach, The System of Nature; W James, "The Dilemma of Determinism," in Pragmatism; M Luther, The Bondage of the Will; R Taylor, Metaphysics; A Farrer, The Freedom of the Will.
	www.mb-soft.com /believe/text/determin.htm (3183 words)

	Free Will & Determinism
		Yet, free will does seem to imply that as a result of its action, the state of the universe is altered.
		Free will is our appearent ability to shape the future; but free will can also be viewed as our ability to pose questions, and then maybe answer them: it presupposes memory and existance.
		Free will seems to operate, at least in part, in the Platonic realm of concept and being; thus, if we fail to sketch out the physics for free will, it may be because we've failed to sketch out the physics underlaying platonic reality first.
	linas.org /theory/freewill.html (3952 words)

	Determinism, Free Will and the Knowledge Argument
		Libertarianism: Determinism and free will are incompatible, and there is free will; therefore, determinism is not true.
		Free will: A being has free will if and only if some of its actions are freely chosen, and an action is freely chosen when it is such that it can be proper or correct to ascribe responsibility to the agent for the act.
		For example, it allows us to say that beings we don't suppose to have free will do have knowledge, as in the case of a dog knowing that his master is at the door.
	personal.bgsu.edu /~roberth/compat.html (2954 words)

	Free Will vs Determinism
		Thus, for this debate, I will use the term "free will" to mean that there exist situations in life where we make genuine, unforced choices, and that when we choose A, we could, even circumstances being similar, also have chosen B. Free will does not mean without influence, coersion and pressure from the environment.
		Thus, it will not be an exaggaration to say that the majority of influental philosophers and theologists in the past have argued that free will does not exist.
		It will be a gross exaggaration to say that free will follows as a result of the equations of quantum mechanics, but it remains a fact that it does away with a deterministic universe.
	blogs.salon.com /0001561/stories/2002/11/17/freeWillVsDeterminism.html (1651 words)

	Varieties of Free Will and Determinism
		Toward this end, it is important to mention that if scientific determinism were true and psychology is a science with the potential of accurate prediction, it's quite possible the whole enterprise of ethics would be moot, since with no free will, we cannot recommend alternative courses of decision or action.
		Free will: the philosophical and theological doctrine that some of our choices are uncaused and effective.
		Lecture Notes on Free Will and Determinism: Central issues of the free will problem with a clear introduction to logical, epistemic, and causal determinism are presented by Norman Swartz.
	philosophy.lander.edu /intro/determinism.html (1473 words)

	A CASE FOR FREE WILL AND DETERMINISM
		A will is not unfree by virtue of the causal roots of its origin and existence (heredity and environment).
		Determinism simply says that action proceeds from will, and will at any moment of time is the sum of a person's desires and tendencies, which absolutely determines the choice of action.
		Inappropriately used, as in the "free will" debate, it implies that causality is coercion.
	www.benbest.com /philo/freewill.html (7409 words)

	Free will - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Determinism is roughly defined as the view that all current and future events are necessitated by past events combined with the laws of nature.
		Buddhism accepts both freedom and determinism (or something similar to it), but rejects the idea of an agent, and thus the idea that freedom is a free will belonging to an agent.
		The theological doctrine of divine foreknowledge is often alleged to be in conflict with free will.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Free_will_and_determinism (7761 words)

	V83.0010 Central Problems in Philosophy
		We will understand Causal Determinism, or Determinism for short, to be the thesis that all of the laws of nature that govern our world are deterministic laws.
		Determinism is the view that we have laws of nature which permit only one possible future for any given past.
		Determinism is the thesis that our world has certain kinds of laws.
	www.princeton.edu /~jimpryor/courses/intro/notes/determinism.html (2305 words)

	Free Will & Determinism
		Determinism in theology is analogous to plot in storytelling.
		As it happens, however, there is another resolution to the problem of free will versus determinism, one that embraces physics and rationalizes faith.
		God determines the principles under which the universe operates, but grants us free will to choose as we wish within that universe.
	www.erasmatazz.com /library/JCGD_Volume_8/Free_Will_Determinism.html (2710 words)

	Free Will and Determinism
		Thus hard determinism, if true, is important as an challenge to the very enterprise of normative ethics, which usually assumes people can be held responsible for at least some of their actions.
		According to the hard determinists, since hard determinism is the only scientifically defensible way to understand humanity, the concept of free will only hides the real issues and interferes with true self-knowledge.
		More moral effort will be required by a person with unfortunate conditioning; however, we always suppose that a person is responsible for the amount of moral effort he puts forth, no matter what his conditioning.
	instruct.westvalley.edu /lafave/FREE.HTM (4570 words)

	Free Will and Determinism
		Nevertheless, it remains an interesting issue whether freedom is compatible with determinism, because (1) it is not clear that quantum indeterminacies have an effect on human action, and (2) if they do, it is hard to see how this could be the sort of effect which helps make it intelligible how we could be free.
		Determinism is the view that every event is completely determined by prior causal factors, so any view that denies this cannot be a version of determinism.
		The basic trouble with the idea that free actions must be uncaused, in their view, is that, to the extent that an action is uncaused, it seems to be random: we happen to perform one action, but there is no explanation of why we performed this action instead of some other.
	www.trinity.edu /cbrown/intro/free_will.html (827 words)

	Notes on Free Will and Determinism - Prof. Norman Swartz (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03)
		Logical Determinism may appear to pose a threat to the existence of free will, but that is only because it misrepresents the nature of the relation between a true proposition and the state-of-affairs in the world that accounts for that proposition's being true.
		The notion that foreknowledge, and in particular God's foreknowledge, is incompatible with free will is not a mere semantic trifle.
		Many persons (again, recall Darrow) who have argued that physical determinism poses a threat to the existence of free will are, I believe, still operating with the remnants of the theory that laws of nature are akin to inviolable prescriptions.
	www.sfu.ca /philosophy/swartz/freewill1.htm (8039 words)

	The Determinism of Free Will
		Nullifying man's free will amounts to destroying him, because the ability to determine his own choices is not one of the facets of man; it is his very essence.
		Which aspect of man will gain the ascendancy and transform the other is the area allocated to man's free will and the object of man's life in the physical world.
		The loss of free will that results from winning the tug of war with the nefesh is the reward he has earned through the exercise of free will.
	www.aish.com /torahportion/mayanot/The_Determinism_of_Free_Will.asp (3260 words)

	Open Directory - Society: Philosophy: Metaphysics: Free Will and Determinism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03)
		Determinism as True, Compatibilism and Incompatibilism as Both False, and the Real Problem - A critique of the view that quantum theory disproves determinism, and an argument that freedom is simultaneously compatible and incompatible with determinism.
		Free Will, Determinism, and Moral Responsibility - The Whole Thing in Brief - Ted Honderich's (still quite long) summary of a deterministic philosophy of mind, and its consequences for our fundamental attitudes.
		Naturalism.Org - Free Will - A series of essays offering a naturalistic critique of libertarian free will, arguing that such freedom is illusory, and also unnecessary to ground our moral practices.
	dmoz.org /Society/Philosophy/Metaphysics/Free_Will_and_Determinism (343 words)

	Free Will and Determinism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03)
		Free will is an illusion, or so I'm compelled to suspect.
		Wilson allows that free will exists, but only in the sense that we can't possibly know all the operations of the brain.
		That's how the illusion of free will works (it's "biologically adaptive," as Wilson puts it), and trying to make things happen is part of what makes life worth living.
	www.hobrad.com /acrefree.htm (446 words)

	Free Will and Determinism
		In this article we'll consider the problems associated with free will and determinism, starting by explaining the terms involved, the difficulty (if there is one), and then trying to understand the proposed solutions.
		It does no good to say that free will is what we have when we choose one direction instead of the other possibilities when beyond the influence of such circumstances, because situations like that are few and far between (indeed, we could argue that they don't exist at all).
		As we discussed in the ninth article, some thinkers want to discount such choices and consider free will to be what we would decide on if we were in full possession of the facts and, as it were, our own masters.
	www.galilean-library.org /int13.html (5004 words)

	Free Will and Determinism
		One way in which people have traditionally distinguished between human beings and everything else in the world is by saying that humans have free will while everything else does not.
		From a commonsense point of view, this seems like a clear case of a free action (i.e., my exercising my free will).
		One way of making determinism look plausible: Claim that human beings are just things in the natural world like everything else and so subject to the same laws of physics, etc. as everything else.
	www.ucs.mun.ca /~alatus/phil1200/Freewill.html (648 words)

	Do We Really Have Free Will: Free Will Versus Determinism
		An act may be entirely determined, yet be free in the sense that it was voluntary and not coerced.
		The libertarian, determinist and free will arguments differ, yet all uphold the paradigm that involuntary actions negate moral responsibility.
		We have free will in the sense that given the same previous conditions, one could have acted otherwise.
	members.aol.com /plweiss1/freewill.htm (513 words)

	Free Will & Determinism
		Determinism is the proposition that, with respect to everything that happens in the world, it could not have been otherwise.
		h) Free will, on this model, is simply an illusion, a point of view that is nicely illustrated at the bottom on p.
		It is for these reasons--logical, theological and scientific--that determinism is an attractive doctrine.
	www.uab.edu /philosophy/faculty/arnold/3-free_will__determinism.htm (2674 words)

	Free Will and Determinism
		In this, the second part of our study, we examine the crucial question of how free, if at all, human choice and action can be.
		In the philosophical literature, persuasive doctrines range from scientific or hard determinism to complete and radical free will.
		On the other hand, if my actions are not determined then they must be random events, but then in that case also I would not responsible for my actions because specific outcome to a random process cannot be willed or decided upon.
	philosophy.lander.edu /ethics/ethicsbook/p1520.html (229 words)

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