Free Will & Determinism Books - Page 3

Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness

Henri Bergson

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The duree: life-flow 5 out of 5 stars.
46 of 51 people found this review helpful.

Bergson, all the rage in the early 1900's, has now been rediscovered,thanks in part to the work of Deleuze et al. Time and Free Will is a great exemplar of Bergson's work and his idea of the duree and the spatialization of time. Bergson presents to the reader an energetic flux which is the precondition of our more vulgar concept of time. With this flux, the past is pulled along by the future and presented to consciousness in the present as a heterogeneous conglomeration, inseperable and uncategorizable. It is this work which inspired the stream of consciousness novelists, especially Proust. But the most remarkable element of Time and Free Will is its demand on the reader to live the duree, to return to the duree and forget oneself in it. The goal is freedom and authenticity and this can only be achieved when letting oneself go, flying like a bird, and despatializing time. This book does not only open the door to phenomenology, but it also contributes in a significant way to french existentialist thought.

Editorial Review:

Bergson argues for free will by showing that the arguments against it come from a confusion of different conceptions of time. As opposed to physicists' idea of measurable time, life is perceived in human experience as a continuous and immeasurable flow rather than as a succession of marked-off states of consciousness.

Willing to Believe: The Controversy over Free Will

R. C. Sproul

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Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Unbelievable 2 out of 5 stars.
11 of 42 people found this review helpful.

Unbelievable:

This book was hard to stomach. I'm use to reading Protestant apologetic nonsense from those who don't claim to be theologians, but Willing to Believe is marketed as "a major work" by a guy who purports to be a "professional theologian," and yet the book is so filled with fiction that you really need to be ignorant of Christian theology to take it seriously. Someone gave Dr. Sproul a Ph.D; one would think he would at least attempt to be professional. Trying to align St. Augustine with Luther and Calvin, Dr. Sproul not only seriously distorts the teachings of the saint, but also the teachings of the Reformers. Anyone who has actually read St. Augustine, Luther, and Calvin knows that the Reformers were as far from St. Augustine as were Pelagius and Nestorius. Sadly, Dr. Sproul, Luther, and Calvin all seem to have missed St. Augustine's words in the Enchiridion; "Whosoever, therefore, says that to be a man is evil (the Reformed doctrine of man's total depravity), or that to be wicked is good (the Reformed doctrine that after justification man remains evil, as well as the Reformed doctrine of predestination to Hell prior to foreseen demerits), comes under that prophetic condemnation: Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil. For such a man finds fault with the works of God, that is, with man, and he praises the defect of man which is iniquity. Every being therefore, even though it be imperfect, is good so far as it is a being; so far as it is defective, it is evil" (Enchiridion 4.13). As regards St. Augustine's stance on the ability of man to cooperate with justifying grace, Dr. Sproul insists he denied it absolutely. Apparently he never read St. Augustine's sermon 11; "He who created you without your cooperation does not justify you without your cooperation. He who created you without you knowing, will not justify you without you knowing" (Sermon 11.13). As Dr. Sproul rightly points out, God creates the free act of the good within us. But our will is not passive as he insists. Such a view necessarily implies double predestination and the doctrine that God creates men for the sole purpose of evil, with Hell as their end - thus making God the author of evil. Dr. Sproul tries valiantly to wriggle out of this, but he cannot escape logic without lying. That is why he is forced into distorting the teachings of not only the Reformers, but of St. Augustine and the Catholic Church which has always insisted that God creates the free act of good within man, but in such a way that man's free will is not violated. Even man's ability and willingness to cooperate with God's grace is caused by God. Furthermore, even though God moves man to freely choose the good, he moves man to choose the good infallibly because due to his omniscience God is able to present to man the very grace God knows the man will not resist, even though the ability to do so remains within him. Dr. Sproul refuses to acknowledge that what the Council of Orange condemned in semi-Pelagianism was not man's ability to cooperate with God's grace, but man's ability to make a first movement toward God without God's special grace. When Dr. Sproul teaches that man is unable to cooperate with God in his justification, he makes God the author of evil and is teaching heresy, pure and simple. Anyone reading this book to get a better idea of the Christian doctrine of free-will and justification should beware that Dr. Sproul is not presenting anywhere near a true picture of the history.
Finally, Dr. Sproul presents the arguments of various Protestant theologians through the last four centuries attempting to show whether they conform to the doctrine of the Reformers. The depth of confusion and disagreement among Protestantism renews in me a thankful praise for the guidance of the Holy Spirit offered to the Catholic Church "until the end of the age."

Editorial Review:

What is the role of the will in believing the good news of the gospel? Why is there so much controversy over free will throughout church history? R. C. Sproul finds that Christians have often been influenced by pagan views of the human will that deny the effects of Adam's fall. In Willing to Believe, Sproul traces the free-will controversy from its formal beginning in the fifth century, with the writings of Augustine and Pelagius, to the present. Readers will gain understanding into the nuances separating the views of Protestants and Catholics, Calvinists and Arminians, and Reformed and Dispensationalists. This book, like Sproul's Faith Alone, is a major work on an essential evangelical tenet.

Running and Philosophy: A Marathon for the Mind

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Fun, Challenging, Motivating 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 11 people found this review helpful.

This is one of the best books in the whole philosophy and pop culture genre.

For philosophers, the essays feel like they come very naturally out of the topic. They are wide-ranging but all grounded in running--no stretches to get the philosophy in. It's as effortless as a comfortable pace can be.

For runners, there is an informative development of ideas that you've probably started to have in your own running, but haven't seen through this far.

Fun, challenging, motivating.

Editorial Review:

A unique anthology of essays exploring the philosophical wisdom runners contemplate when out for a run. It features writings from some of America’s leading philosophers, including Martha Nussbaum, Charles Taliaferro, and J.P. Moreland.

• A first-of-its-kind collection of essays exploring those gems of philosophical wisdom runners contemplate when out for a run
  
• Topics considered include running and the philosophy of friendship; the freedom of the long distance runner; running as aesthetic experience, and “Could a Zombie Run a Marathon?”
  
• Contributing essayists include philosophers with athletic experience at the collegiate level, philosophers whose pasttime is running, and one philosopher who began running to test the ideas in his essay

Grunch of Giants

R. Buckminster Fuller

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Still timely, twenty plus years later 5 out of 5 stars.
33 of 34 people found this review helpful.

People got impatient with Fuller because he kept throwing out a timeline which went something like this: if we work like crazy for the next 10 years, we might solve some of the major problems we've always put up with, e.g. death by starvation to take a big one.

Then another decade goes by, and a lot more people starve, and people shake their heads thinking "Bucky, Bucky... he just didn't have a clue, did he?" Well, I say he most certainly did. Not his problem or fault that we never staged his "design science decade" with such concerted effort and focus. And the potential to improve our collective lot aboard Spaceship Earth is still real.

What's fun about 'Grunch of Giants' is it marks the end of a long trajectory, where the 'real Bucky' finally hits the water, after the decades-long arc of a canon ball. He makes a big splash, and sets up a lot of ripple effects, many of which we're feeling to this day.

The main thing is he reawakens threads around the issue of corporate personhood, questioning how LLCs got to be "persons" in the eyes of the law. Decades later, Thom Hartmann starts to uncover some answers in 'Unequal Protection' which deserves to show up as a kind of sequel to 'GofG' on many levels.

Countering a soulless march to oblivion, an automatic pilot response to a desperate situation, were heroics, integrity, and the more agile networks. Readers may spontaneously think of the Internet (still in its infancy when this book came out -- no web to speak of), but I also think of networks like CBS, a corporation to be sure, but with a lot of life in it (not soulless).

Bucky was aware of his image through the years, how people saw him. He started out as a kind of benign Buck Rogers, one of those mad inventors coming up with wacky futuristic designs, and making comforting noises about utopian possibilities. But in the meantime the Cold War had gotten going in earnest, followed by a backlash in the 1960s and 1970s, with a new generation finding that Sword of Damocles (the ongoing prospect of immanent nuclear holocaust) entirely unacceptable. The USA became radicalized, as Colby confronted Congress with crazy-making testimony regarding Vietnam, as John Kerry squared off against the Westmoreland types, as colleges projected 'Hearts and Minds' to shocked audiences (1974). Fuller kept going, incorporating all these developments, and coming back with 'Critical Path'. Plus he floated World Game. Increasingly, he had to be taken seriously, less as a harmless crackpot entertainer (like the guy in the 'Six Flags' ad campaign), and more as a serious revolutionary thinker, with difficult-to-sort-out ties to the CIA (E.J. Applewhite, his lead collaborator on 'Synergetics' was an associate of Helms, another Yale grad, and former Deputy Inspector General of the agency -- as the back of the paperback edition of 'Synergetics' made sure we knew).

Indeed, the CIA figures prominently in GofG, which is part of what sets it apart as more "realistic" than some of his earlier poetry. Stocks and bonds, treasury bills, prominent figures of the day mentioned by name -- it seemed like Bucky was finally intersecting our special case reality, at some odd angle, true, but that just added to the uncanny feel of the book. Plus it's very literary, alluding to Orlando Furiouso, which in turn links to Orlando, Florida and the giant BuckyBall at EPCOT: Spaceship Earth. To top it all off, around the same time this book was declaring the USA we have known "bankrupt and extinct," Reagan and company decide this'd be the right time to give Fuller a Medal of Freedom. Shortly after, Fuller dies. 'Cosmography' was posthumous.

This is Bucky at the top of his game in my opinion, a great work of literature. I'm surprised it's not on more college syllabi, as it's quite short and readable, yet opens onto a huge number of threads both into history and mythology. Mythology is about both the very distant past and the very distant future (Fuller thought they sort of came together, given his eternally regenerative universe model), and 'Grunch of Giants', like 'Synergetics' itself, is very definitely a major work in the humanities. Five stars for Bucky.

Editorial Review:

This five-hour long recording is a passionate summary of Bucky's ideas. He reviews his assesment of humanity's most pressing problems, global strategies for solving these problems, and the conclusions from his "56-year experiment."

Grace, Faith, Free Will: Contrasting Views of Salvation: Calvinism and Arminianism

Robert E. Picirilli

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Grace, Faith, Free Will 4 out of 5 stars.
32 of 32 people found this review helpful.

I found this book to be essentially everything I'd hoped it would be: a fair look at Calvinism and Arminianism (the author is a proponent of "Reformed Arminianism") which is focused on the Biblical and philosophical arguments for Arminianism and not on flinging vitriol at Calvinism and Calvinists. If you've never heard of Calvinism or Arminianism this book may a bit too much, but in general the intellectual level is such that if you read carefully and keep your Bible close by you will not have problems. (One exception to this is the occasional use of terminology which is not really explained and which is not necessarily common knowledge, ex. "Pellagianism"; this is not frequent enough to cause problems.) The author aims to present Arminius's theology ("Reformation Arminianism") and thus avoid some later developments whose roots many would trace to Arminian theology (such as "open theism", a kind of Yoda-like view of God ["Difficult to see. Always in motion the future is."], and compare/contrast this with modern Calvinism (hence the complaints I recall from other reviewers that the author does not cite Calvin himself). Interestingly, the one area where he departs from this aim is in the doctrine of perseverance. Picirilli quotes Arminius as saying he had never taught the possibility of apostasy [loss of salvation] but that some passages of Scripture seem to suggest it. Thus, at least based on what Picirilli cites, Arminius believed in perseverance but had questions, or even doubts, about it. The author departs from Arminius here and argues for the possibility of apostasy in believers who subsequently reject their faith.

The author makes a number of good points that I hadn't thought of before and includes a number of good word studies, particularly regarding a couple of passages which 5-point Calvinists and 4-point Calvinists/Arminians disagree on regarding the atonement of Christ's death for only the elect or for all mankind. As with all books on theology, though, read carefully and read critically. Theologies are manmade constructions which cannot ever hope to contain the greatness of God and His purposes. Whether you agree with Picirilli in part, in whole, or not at all, I think you will find that he is indeed attempting to draw his beliefs from Scripture. Regardless of where we line up in the Calvinism/Arminianism debate, may that be true of all believers.

Editorial Review:

Grace, Faith, Free Will addresses issues that have divided Calvinists and Arminians since the Reformation. Using historical, systematic, and Biblical theology, Robert Picirilli contrasts both views of salvation. His "Reformation Arminianism" reclaims the original beliefs of Arminius and his defenders.

A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will

Robert Kane

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Accessible to students with no background in the subject, A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will provides an extensive and up-to-date overview of all the latest views on this central problem of philosophy. Opening with a concise introduction to the history of the problem of free will--and its place in the history of philosophy--the book then turns to contemporary debates and theories about free will, determinism, and related subjects like moral responsibility, coercion, compulsion, autonomy, agency, rationality, freedom, and more. Classical compatibilist and new compatibilist theories of free will are considered along with the latest incompatibilist or libertarian theories and the most recent skeptical challenges to free will. Separate chapters are devoted to the relation of free will to moral responsibility and ethics; to modern science; and to religious questions about predestination, divine foreknowledge, and human freedom. Numerous down-to-earth examples and challenging thought experiments enliven the text. The book is an ideal addition to introduction to philosophy, metaphysics, and free will courses.

Dawkins' GOD: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life

Alister E. McGrath

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Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Alister E. McGrath is one of the world’s leading theologians, with a doctorate in the sciences. Richard Dawkins is one of the bestselling popular science writers, with outspoken and controversial views on religion. This fascinating and provoking work is the first book-length response to Dawkins’ ideas, and offers an ideal introduction to the topical issues of science and religion.

Addresses fundamental questions about Dawkins’ approach to science and religion: Is the gene actually selfish? Is the blind watchmaker a suitable analogy? Are there other ways of looking at things?

Tackles Dawkins’ hostile and controversial views on religion, and examines the religious implications of his scientific ideas, making for a fascinating and provoking debate

Written in a very engaging and accessible style, ideal to those approaching scientific and religious issues for the first time

Alister McGrath is uniquely qualified to write this book. He is one of the world’s best known and most respected theologians, with a strong research background in molecular biophysics

A superb book by one of the world’s leading theologians, which will attract wide interest in the growing popular science market, similar to Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine (1999).

Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power (Columbia Themes in Philosophy)

John Searle

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Our self-conception derives mostly from our own experience. We believe ourselves to be conscious, rational, social, ethical, language-using, political agents who possess free will. Yet we know we exist in a universe that consists of mindless, meaningless, unfree, nonrational, brute physical particles. How can we resolve the conflict between these two visions?

In Freedom and Neurobiology, the philosopher John Searle discusses the possibility of free will within the context of contemporary neurobiology. He begins by explaining the relationship between human reality and the more fundamental reality as described by physics and chemistry. Then he proposes a neurobiological resolution to the problem by demonstrating how various conceptions of free will have different consequences for the neurobiology of consciousness.

In the second half of the book, Searle applies his theory of social reality to the problem of political power, explaining the role of language in the formation of our political reality. The institutional structures that organize, empower, and regulate our lives-money, property, marriage, government-consist in the assignment and collective acceptance of certain statuses to objects and people. Whether it is the president of the United States, a twenty-dollar bill, or private property, these entities perform functions as determined by their status in our institutional reality. Searle focuses on the political powers that exist within these systems of status functions and the way in which language constitutes them.

Searle argues that consciousness and rationality are crucial to our existence and that they are the result of the biological evolution of our species. He addresses the problem of free will within the context of a neurobiological conception of consciousness and rationality, and he addresses the problem of political power within the context of this analysis.

A clear and concise contribution to the free-will debate and the study of cognition, Freedom and Neurobiology is essential reading for students and scholars of the philosophy of mind.

On Liberty and The Subjection of Women (Penguin Classics)

John Stuart Mill

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The great defender of individual liberty 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

John Stuart Mill, 1806-73, worked for the East India Co. helped run Colonial India from England. Minister of Parliament 1865-68 he served one term. Maiden speech was a disaster his second was great success. He was first MP to propose that women should be given the vote on equal footing with the men who could vote. He got 1/3 support, England gives franchise to women after U.S. He was a great Feminist, his essay "Subjection of Women" is written with great passion and prose. It was a brave position for him to take he was ridiculed for it. He favored democracy, and letting more men from lower classes the right to vote, but believed that people that are more educated should have more votes then less educated because they would make better decisions about what government should do. He would have wanted to extend education to the masses, so that all may have gotten 2-3 votes and so on. He didn't think it should be extended to where a small elite could carry the day on votes. The idea was that if the working class, and middle class, where divided on an issue, the people with more intelligence would have the power to tip the balance. Mill thought that people with more education would probably not only be better able to make political decisions, especially in terms of intellectually being able to see what would be best for the government to do, but that they would also be more concerned about the common good publicly then people in general. He was intensely educated by his father James. John could read Greek, and Latin at 6 yrs.; his Dad tutored him at home. Dad thought environment was everything. He was treated like an adult, never played games with kids; he had a very cerebral upbringing. He had a period of depression in his twenties, it changed his philosophy, and he recognized the importance of developing feelings along with the intellect, this is something that he stressed in his work. He read poetry to get out of depression; he became devoted to poetry and became a romantic. He fell in love with a married woman Harriet Taylor, was a platonic relationship, after her husband's death they married 3 years later and probably never consummated the marriage maybe due to his having syphilis. His dedication to "On Liberty" is to her, very devoted to each other. Both buried together in Avignon France where they used to vacation.

Mill as a moral theorist subscribed to a theory we call Utilitarianism. It means---In some way morality is about the maximization of happiness. Whether actions are right or wrong depends on how happiness can be most effectively maximized. I say in some way, because there are allot of different kinds of Utilitarians. Allot of different ways of saying exactly how it is the maximization of happiness comes into morality. Therefore, happiness is clearly an important idea for Utilitarians. Mill has a hedonistic view of happiness, he thinks that happiness can be defined in terms of "pleasure in the absence of pain." What is distinctive about Mill in this area is that he believes that some kinds of pleasure are better than others are, and add more to a person's happiness than other kinds of pleasures. He believes in what he calls, "higher quality pleasures." These are pleasures, he says, that we get from the exercise of faculties that only human beings happen to have. So the intellect, imagination, the moral feelings, these are the sources of higher quality pleasures people use. His view seems to be that a certain quantity of intellectual pleasure just adds more to your happiness, and a given quantity of some lower pleasure like a kind we would share with the animals such as sensation, taste, sexual pleasure, etc. His "higher quality pleasures" in a way echo Aristotle's ethics. The idea of those things that make us distinctly human that are the real key to our happiness, that is in Mill also. It is not as limited to reason and intellect as Aristotle thinks. Mill recognizes the importance of the appreciation of beauty, aesthetic pleasure, and moral pleasure. He frankly owes a debt to Aristotle that he never properly acknowledges, never gives him proper credit.

"On Liberty" is Mill's is his most widely read and enduring work. It is an indispensable essay on political thought, which strenuously argues for individual liberty. He is defending what he calls the "liberty principle." It is a principle that guarantees individuals quite a bit of personal freedom. "That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant." These quoted sentences in John Stuart Mill's book, "On Liberty," embody the crux of his argument; that the power of the state must intrude as little as possible on the liberty of its citizenry. In essence, Mill was against using the power of the state through its lawmaking apparatus to compel citizens to conduct themselves in ways that society deems moral or appropriate. Mill thought that people had not only a right, but also a duty to develop their intellectual faculties, which is indispensable to maximize their happiness. He believed that society improved for all its citizens when they where left unfettered to the maximum extent possible, allowing them to use their imagination and intellect to improve themselves. Mill postulates a theory that societies usually institute laws based primarily on "personal preference" of its citizenry instead of established principles. This lack of clarity of opinion often leads to the government frequently interfering in the lives of its citizens unnecessarily. For Mill, there are very few times when the state can infringe on the personal liberty of others. Firstly, the state has the right to promulgate laws that prevent a person's actions from harming others. Secondly, the state must protect those citizens who are not mature enough to protect themselves, such as children. Thirdly, he exempts, "... backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage." In Mill's view, immature societies need a benevolent leader to rule them until they have developed to a point where they, "... have attained the capacity of being guided to their own improvement by conviction or persuasion ..." Mill said this third exemption did not apply to any of the countries in Europe. Mill believed that forced morality by the state on its citizen's liberties was destructive to their inward development, and could even lead to a violent reaction by them against the government.


There are different parts of his defense of this, different arguments that he gives. He has a long chapter on freedom of speech and press. He has some very specific reasons why he thinks those freedoms are important. Always in the background for Mill is the idea of development, and making it possible for more people to enjoy these higher quality pleasures. How do we help people develop their distinctly human faculties, in ways that will help them enjoy their higher quality pleasures? Because for him that is the way, we maximize the total amount of happiness that is enjoyed in the world, and that is the object of morality as far as he is concerned. Utilitarianists believe that maximizing happiness is ultimately, what morality is all about. That does not mean maximizing your own happiness that means maximizing the total amount of happiness that is enjoyed, not only by yourself but also by everybody else as well.

Roger Kimball, in his book "Experiments Against Reality" wrote, "On Liberty" was published in 1859, coincidentally the same year as "On the Origin of Species." Darwin's book has been credited--and blamed--for all manner of moral and religious mischief. But in the long run "On Liberty" may have effected an even greater revolution in sentiment.

I read this book for a graduate class in Philosophy. Recommended reading for anyone interested in philosophy, political science, and history.

Editorial Review:

Two cornerstones of liberalism from the great social radical of English philosophy

John Stuart Mill was a prodigious thinker who sharply challenged the beliefs of his age. In On Liberty—one of the sacred texts of liberalism—he argues that any democracy risks becoming a “tyranny of opinion” in which minority views are suppressed if they do not conform to those of the majority. The Subjection of Women, written shortly after the death of Mill’s wife, Harriet, stresses the importance of sexual equality. Together they provide eloquent testimony to the hopes and anxieties of Victorian England, and offer a trenchant consideration of what it really means to be free.

Choice Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

Michael Allingham

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An introduction, but not for the real novice 4 out of 5 stars.
19 of 19 people found this review helpful.

"Short and to the point" describes the book perfectly, but what is the point? More specifically, to whom is it introducing the subject.

I found the book a good description of the logic behind choice theory; on what are the numerous different bases on which we can build a "theory" of choice; and where this can lead. From the simplest ideas of choice we are led to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem and so can see that "rational" choices may not satisfy everyone in a democracy - a result that needs to be known at all levels of a polity.

However it's supposed to be an introduction. If you're someone not used to using logic there are too many slippery areas where you'll get lost, even though the author tries to ground the work in reality - sometimes successfully, sometimes not. And for someone who wants to see more of the practical implications it is a pity that these are not explicated more.

This book will suit some as an introduction, but not all.

Editorial Review:

We make choices all the time--about how to spend our money, about how to spend our time, about what to do with our lives. And we are also constantly judging the decisions other people make as rational or irrational. But what kind of criteria are we applying when we say that a choice is rational? What guides our own choices, especially in cases where we don't have complete information about the outcomes? What strategies should be applied in making decisions which affect a lot of people, as in the case of government policy?
This book explores what it means to be rational in all these contexts. It introduces ideas from economics, philosophy, and other areas, showing how the theory applies to decisions in everyday life, and to particular situations such as gambling and the allocation of resources.