Once a leading disciple and confidant of Freud, Otto Rank parted company with the psychoanalytic community in the 1920s as his writings began focusing more on the cure of neuroses rather than on the seemingly interminable process of fostering a patient's in-depth understanding o…
In this work, Steven Horst addresses the apparent dissonance between the picture of the natural world that arises from the sciences and our understanding of ourselves as agents who think and act.
The nature and limitations of human freedom have been discussed for millennia and continue to be widely and enthusiastically debated today. This is not surprising, as our sense of freedom is felt to be an essential part of what it is to be human and many fundamental issues, such…
Dieses Buch hat nicht die Form einer Monographie. Es ist ein philosophisches und zugleich literarisches Buch: Die fiktiven Philosophen Bill Headstrong und Wilhelm Kornblum ringen leidenschaftlich um ihren Lieblingsautor William James (1842-1910) und die eigentliche Bedeutung der…
Are choice and free will possible in a world governed by deterministic fundamental equations? What sense would determinism make if many events and processes in the world seemed to be governed by chance? These and many other questions emphasize the fact that chance and choice are…
The philosopher Galen Strawson and the author Philip Pullman explore the point of view that entities such as human beings and subatomic particles have subjective experience. The former scholar explores this theory through philosophical argumentation, and the latter scholar explo…
A Pragmatic Approach to Libertarian Free Will argues that the kind of free will required for moral responsibility and just desert is libertarian free will. It is a source of great controversy whether such a libertarian view is coherent and whether we should believe that we have …
A Pragmatic Approach to Libertarian Free Will argues that the kind of free will required for moral responsibility and just desert is libertarian free will. It is a source of great controversy whether such a libertarian view is coherent and whether we should believe that we have …
The aim of the present thesis is to analyse how the narrative affects the various philosophical debates in Tristram Shandy and Jacques le fataliste. Contrary to what one expects from a philosophical novel, Sterne and Diderot do not impose upon the reader an authorial and authori…
37 Neuroscientific Threaths to Free Will
In this chapter, I review recent work on neuroscientifi c threats to free will. What is it for something to threaten free will? Consider, fi rst, an apparent threat. You are walking in the dark, and a shadow looms in the distance. It certainly appears threatening, but you are no…
Questions concerning free will are intertwined with issues in almost every area of philosophy, from metaphysics to philosophy of mind to moral philosophy, and are also informed by work in different areas of science (principally physics, neuroscience and social psychology). Free …