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determinism, historical   Reference library

Patrick Gardiner

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (2 ed.)

..., historical . A conception of human affairs according to which the historical process conforms to developmental patterns or laws that render its constitutive events necessary or inevitable. Doctrines affirming such a position exhibit wide variations. While those of an earlier vintage frequently involved providential or teleological assumptions , ones of later date have tended instead to presuppose the causal principle that whatever occurs in history is explicable as a law-governed consequence of empirically specifiable antecedent conditions. Views of...

politics and determinism   Reference library

Kevin Magill

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (2 ed.)

...and determinism . Setting aside the special cases of economic and historical determinism, the clearest consequences of determinism in politics are for a cluster of ideas about punishment and reward, in which the concept of desert is central. Conservative advocates of tougher sentencing are apt to stress the mischievousness and evil of criminals, just as they discount the circumstances and aetiology of criminal behaviour. Tougher punishment, they argue, is what evil men and women deserve . Philosophers disagree about the implications of determinism for...

freedom and determinism   Reference library

Roy C. Weatherford

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (2 ed.)

...must change if determinism is true, but not everything must change. The problem is more attitudinal than conceptual. Some of our present attitudes and responses, which depend on ideas of origination, are impossible if determinism is true. But other kinds of them are possible. Certain kinds of ‘life-hopes, personal feelings, knowledge, moral responsibility, the rightness of actions and the moral standing of persons … persist, and our lives do not become dark, but remain open to celebration’. To focus on the factual question, one historical argument against...

determinism   Reference library

Roy C. Weatherford

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (2 ed.)

...But, as remarked, the most important issue historically has been moral responsibility. And what can be said about it applies in a general way to the other implications of determinism. Typically we believe that agents are morally responsible only for those acts that are freely chosen and within the power of the agent to decide. We are guilty only if we could have done otherwise. But if determinism is true, then in some sense we never could have done otherwise. Thus many philosophers have concluded that determinism and holding people responsible are...

Dray, William Herbert (1921–)   Reference library

The Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers

...some show how an event was “possible,” and so on. In his later writings, Dray moves on from explanation to see what can be said about the role of values in history, about objectivity and subjectivity, human freedom and determinism. In each case his interest is in the particular way in which these matters affect the specific piece of historical writing. For that reason, Dray’s detailed analysis of ways of explaining, influenced by H. L. A. Hart and A. M. Honorés Causation and the Law, resists simple summary. Dray thinks that there are legitimate, nondeductive...

Marxism after communism   Reference library

Terrell Carver

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (2 ed.)

...epistemology (knowledge is derived empirically from social interactions with the material world). More radically, postmodern Marxists have reconceptualized Marxism as grounded in a democratic and egalitarian civil society. This cuts Marxism loose from historical teleology and philosophical determinism, while retaining its critical engagement with politics. Prof. Terrell Carver R. Bhaskar , Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation (London, 1986). G. A. Cohen , Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence , expanded. edn. (Oxford, 2000). E. Laclau and C....

Bayle editions   Reference library

The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy

...edition An Historical and Critical Dictionary and the definitive English-language edition of Des Maizeaux, The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr Peter Bayle , also from the second edition and in five volumes. The British editions and Bayle's proto-postmodern style had a persistent influence both on literature and philosophy – Laurence Sterne read it and it appears to have influenced the philosophy in Tristram Shandy . In the same year as Des Maizeaux's edition a ten-volume work appeared entitled A General Dictionary, Historical and Critical ...

O'Connor, Daniel John (1914–2012)   Reference library

The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy

... the case in favour of both causal and logical determinism, O'Connor considers the folk argument for free will , the deterministic response, and some objections to the latter. The next section is concerned with compatibilism or soft-determinism. In it O'Connor attempts to reconcile the freedom of the will and determinism. This is followed by an examination of the principle of uncertainty and a closer look at scientific determinism. Two questions are then raised: ...

communitarianism   Reference library

Elizabeth Frazer

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (2 ed.)

...communal practices, again by contrast with liberalism, which stresses individual rights and conceives of the individual as the ultimate originator and bearer of value. The centrality of the real, historical, individual person in communitarian theory, though, distances it equally from certain varieties of Marxism —specifically strong varieties of historical determinism and those varieties of state socialism where power is highly centralized. Communitarians can be understood to be conducting a straightforwardly prescriptivist argument: human life will go better...

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–80)   Quick reference

A Dictionary of Philosophy (3 ed.)

...The self thus constituted is historically situated, but as an agent whose own mode of locating itself in the world makes for responsibility and emotion. Responsibility is, however, a burden that we frequently cannot bear, and bad faith arises when we deny our own authorship of our actions, seeing them instead as forced responses to situations not of our own making. Sartre thus locates the essential nature of human existence in the capacity for choice, although choice, being equally incompatible with determinism and with the existence of a Kantian ...

Collins, Anthony (1676–1729)   Reference library

The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy

...more recently the older view has been endorsed by James O'Higgins in his scholarly study of Collins. Collins's next book followed four years later; this is his classic defence of determinism, A Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty ( 1717 ). It is his last strictly philosophical work, in which he unites the psychic determinism of Locke with the metaphysical determinism of Hobbes and Spinoza . The work was widely praised by Voltaire , Priestley (who reprinted it in 1790 ) and the French materialists. After 1717 Collins's work becomes more...

Schwarzschild, Steven Samuel (1924–89)   Reference library

The Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers

...most versions of Christianity. The world, though redeemable, has not yet been redeemed. To know the world is to see that the fundamental task that defines us as human beings is the obligation to improve it, not defend it. Any suggestion that God and humans are locked into a determinism that prevents contemplation or realization of alternatives to the status quo is unacceptable. As a blueprint for what the best alternative should be, Judaism is best understood as a rational system for improving the quality of human life. BIBLIOGRAPHY “ The Personal Messiah –...

Millar, John (1735–1801)   Reference library

The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy

...not advance simple social theories such as materialism , climate or economic determinism; rather, he develops what might be called the multi-causal theory of society. He combines the characteristics of human nature and advancement of humanity with social, political and economic circumstances. Thus he synthesizes the real and the ideal in man and society. His synthesis is quite penetrating, and was highly regarded. The second work is a bulky constitutional history, Historical View of the English Government from the Settlement of the Saxons in Britain to the...

voluntarism   Reference library

The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy

...as an end and the will moves the intellect as an agent ( Summa theologiae , 1a q82 a4). But Aquinas also recognizes cases of intellectual determinism when he writes that ‘if the will be offered an object which is good universally and from every point of view, the will tends to it of necessity, if it wills anything at all, since it cannot will the opposite’ (1a2ae q10 a3). The possibility of such intellectual determinism seems to be excluded by John Duns Scotus when he writes that ‘nothing other than the will is the total cause of volition in the will’ (II...

Caird, (Alice) Mona (1854–1932)   Reference library

The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy

...contract between equal partners, dissoluble at will. Caird's work in the twentieth century developed her belief in personal liberty ; in particular, she denied that the individual should be subordinated to the race. Directly attacking the historical construction of womanhood, Caird refused to accept biological determinism, arguing that ‘traditional’ gender roles were in fact man-made social constructs. Many feminists of the late nineteenth century claimed that emancipation would ideally allow women to devote themselves to motherhood. In contrast, Caird...

Donagan, Alan Harry (1925–91)   Reference library

The Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers

...Levine, Susan . A Critical Analysis of Some of the Limitations on the Scope of Moral Prohibitions Suggested by Two Quasi-absolutist Moral Theorists . PhD dissertation, Brown University (Providence, R.I., 1982). Sellars, Wilfrid . “ Reply to Alan Donagan on ’My Views on “Determinism and Freedom”, “ Philosophical Studies 27 (1975): 149–84. Stout, Jeffrey . “ The Philosophical Interest of the Hebrew-Christian Moral Tradition, ” Thomist 47 (1983): 165–96. Tollefsen, Christopher . “ Donagan, Abortion, and Civil Rebellion, ” Public Affairs Quarterly 11...