Review of Galen Strawson 's Perspective on the Issue of Free Will and its Critiques

Document Type : علمی پژوهشی

Authors

• tayyebe Gholami ¹
• zahra خزاعی ²

¹ university of kashan

² دانشگاه قم

10.22067/epk.2024.86671.1313

Abstract

In daily life, humans adopt their responsibilities with a sense of freedom and choice, but in a world where deterministic laws prevail, this adoption faces challenges. This conflict comes from the belief in a free image of human being. Questions arise as to how humans can be free in coercion and how their will can act freely? If humans have their own free will, this creates their responsibility. But if humans cannot be free, why should they be blamed or praised based on their behavior? Also, in the absence of human free will, the need for moral, legal, and social concepts is challenged. From the perspective of skeptical philosophers such as Galen Strawson, free will and consequently moral responsibility are impossible. Given his fundamental argument, he is skeptical about the possibility of free will. He argues that free will can be possible if the individual is their own essential cause, but the individual is not their own essential cause. This article tries to examine and criticize Galen Strawson's view of freedom from an analytical-descriptive perspective.

Keywords

• free will
• moral responsibility
• essential cause
• fundamental argument

Main Subjects

• Islamic Philosophy and Kalam

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References

 Strawson, Galen. Freedom and Belief. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

 Strawson, Galen. "Consciousness, Free Will and the Unimportance of Determinism." Journal Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, Volume 32, 1989, Issue 1, 3-27.

 Strawson, Galen. "The Unhelpfulness of Indeterminism." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (1): 153.

Strawson, Galen. "Your Move: The Maze of Free Will." The New York Times. Available at: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com.

 Strawson, Galen. "Free Agent." Philosophical Topics 32: 361.

Strawson, Galen. "Consciousness, Free Will, and the Unimportance of Determinism." Inquiry 32, Volume 32, Issue 1: 9.

Strawson, G. "The Bounds of Freedom." In The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, edited by R. Kane, 443. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Strawson, Galen. "The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility." Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, Vol. 75, No. 1/2, 15-16.

Kelsey, Eli Benjamin. "Freedom and Forfeiture: Responding to Galen Strawson's Basic Argument." PhD thesis, Georgia State University, 2008.

 

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