Philosophers
We include those philosophers whose work made the greatest contribution to our three major problems, freedom of the will, values, and knowledge.
"By convention hot, by convention cold, but in reality atoms and void.” (Fr. 117, Diogenes Laertius IX, 72)
Chance is real. Accidents have indefinite causes.
Determinism is escaped by the random swerve of atoms in the void.
"If there is free will, all things do not happen according to fate; if all things do not happen according to fate, there is not a certain order of causes; and if there is not a certain order of causes, neither is there a certain order of things foreknown by God."
Do the universal categories exist?
"God must needs have given free will to man. God's foreknowledge is not opposed to our free choice." (On Free Choice of the Will, Book Two, I, 7, Book Three, IV, 38)
Man is free. There is no predestination.
For God, time is an eternal moment (totem simul). Free will is compatible with God causing all things.
God, like man, has free will. To know his works, they must be studied. They cannot be deduced by Reason alone.
God may not have foreknowledge of future contingent events, which depend on human choices.
"Unless you attribute all or everything to free will, as the Pelagians do, the contradictions of Scripture still remain...Therefore, we must go to extremes, deny free will altogether and ascribe everything to God." (Bondage of the Will, AW 755)
The will is self-determining, to the exclusion of any prior cause outside the will. (Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, p.18)
"Cogito, ergo sum." "We are so conscious of the freedom and indeterminacy which exist in us, that there is nothing we comprehend more clearly and perfectly"
"That which I say necessitates and determinates every action is the sum of all those things which, being now existent, conduce and concur to the production of the action hereafter, whereof if any one one thing were wanting, the effect could not be produced. This concourse of causes, whereof every one is determined to be such as it is by a like concourse of former causes, may well be called the decree of God." (Of Liberty and Necessity, sect 11)
"[God is] the free cause of all things; that all things are in Him, and so depend on Him that without Him they can neither be nor be conceived; and finally that all things have been predetermined by Him... In the mind there is no absolute or free will, but the mind is determined to this or that volition by a cause, which is also determined by another cause, and this again by another, and so on ad infinitum." (Spinoza, Ethic, Appendix and Prop XLVIII)
The Principle of Sufficient Reason says that every event has a reason or cause in the prior state of the world.
You cannot get "ought" from "is."
Kant reacted to the Enlightenment, to the Age of Reason, and to Newtonian physics (which he understood better than any other philosopher), by accepting determinism as a fact in the physical world, which he called the phenomenal world. He then put limits on what we can know by pure speculative Reason, in order to make room for belief in a timeless noumenal world that includes God, Freedom, and Immortality.
Kant's noumenal world is a variation on Plato's Idea of Soul, Descartes' Mind, and the Scholastics' idea of a world in which all times are present to the eye of God. His idea of free will is a most esoteric form of compatibilism. Our decisions are made in our souls outside of time and only
appear determined to our senses, which are governed by our built-in
a priori categories of understanding, like space and time.
"I cannot even make the assumption - as the practical interests of morality require - of God, freedom, and immortality,
if I do not deprive speculative reason of its pretensions to transcendent insight. For to arrive at these, it must
make use of principles which, in fact, extend only to the objects of possible experience, and which cannot be
applied to objects beyond this sphere without converting them into phenomena, and thus rendering the practical extension of pure reason impossible. I must, therefore, abolish knowledge, to make room for belief."
(Preface to Second Edition, Critique of Practical Reason)
"Philosophy is the History of Philosophy"
"Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills."
"Idealism without Materialism is void. Materialism without Idealism is blind."
"My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will."
"We no longer have any sympathy today for the concept of 'free will'."
"You are not morally free to change laws in this world. But you are moral and free because you are in the eternal sense a part of the World-Creator."
"I believe evil is part of a good order."
"Where determinism fails, science fails." (Determinism and Physics, p.18)
"First of all, I do of course agree that quantum theoretical
indeterminacy in
a sense cannot help, because this leads merely to probabilistic laws, and we do not wish to say that such things as free decisions are just probabilistic affairs."
"Indeterminism is necessary but not sufficient to allow for human freedom and especially for creativity."
Man is condemned to freedom, which is absurd without values.
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