Determinism and Free Will

In ancient Greece the idea of free will was clearly derived from the difference between free individuals and slaves, in modern times from the political structures of rising democratic electoral systems. A whole lineage of philosophers tried to reconcile the idea of determinism, the theological one in particular, with that of free will as uninhibited intentional action. Early Greek thought regarded free will as the denial of all intrinsic limitations upon the pursuit of voluntary goals. You may need to provide specific examples for your term paper on Determinism and Free Will. Plato shows in the Republic that social structures and moral conventions can be masterminded and manipulated at will. Both Socrates and Plato shifted the locus of freedom from the power to affect external events to the inner exercise of will and conviction. For Aristotle the power of free will lies in the capacity of thought to harmonize itself not only with God but with the good and the good life. To be free meant to be rational. According to Augustine of Hippo (On Free Will), God's foreknowledge of events does not curtail the capacity to choose and indeed the necessity of doing so, since God's knowledge of eternity is somewhat akin to that of a ubiquitous present. The will is certainly free and there is no reason to believe that God's knowledge of the object of the will should impair its freedom in any way. Humanity's freedom is to love God and act upon its own will. In accordance with the same line of argument, Boethius defined eternity as "the simultaneous and complete possession of infinite life." Thomas Aquinas similarly held that God's eternal vision could in no way cause one's actions.

Modern philosophers struggled with the dilemma of divine foreknowledge and human freedom by redefining the latter, for instance, as "lack of constraint" (Hobbes); others, for example, Descartes, emphasized the infinity of the will in espousing the true and rejecting the false even though human understanding may be limited. Spinoza conceived of human free will as self-determination; Leibniz, as a form of uncaused spontaneity, which was later to be equated with "freedom from indifference." It followed from these views that God could never be blamed for human errors. Yet this concept of a mind causally undetermined, inexplicably free, was found unsatisfactory and was replaced by Locke's concept of preference as cause (opposed to the previous idea about the irrelevance of judgments to one's will), and by Hume's argument that a free action is one that could have been avoided. Example to consider when writing an essay: For Kant, determinism is phenomenal and freedom is noumenal, since the pure practical reason upon which one freely acts lies outside the realm of causation and makes up the essence and autonomy of moral life. Hegel and his left-wing followers looked upon freedom and necessity as two sides of the same coin, two ideas dialectically interconnected through "knowledge" or "understanding": Freedom is necessity understood. Other nineteenth-century idealists, called libertarians, tended to postulate a special entity, the "self," which uses the body as a causal instrument while being itself immune to causation. The materialists, to the contrary, had favored since antiquity an almost total subordination of freedom to the necessary or contingent play of natural and social forces outside of both individual and divine control.