Blaise Pascal - by Peter Rollins "Five Part Course on Pascal's 'Pensees'"

Blaise Pascal, "Faith without virtue is meaningless"

Introduction - The Child Prodigy, Blaise Pascal

Setting Pascal Ablaze | A Pyrotheological Reading of Pensées

by Peter Rollins

June 14, 2023

JUNE 14 AT 10:52 AM

Setting Pascal Ablaze | A Five-Part Course

Blaise Pascal has earned his place in history as one of the world’s greatest mathematicians and scientists, making important intellectual contributions from the age of 16, including the invention of a calculator as a teenager - just to help his dad work out his taxes. However, Pascal is most famous for his philosophical reflections. Reflections which possess a richness, style and insight that make them feel as fresh and vital today as when they were first written.

His masterpiece was an unfinished work that came to be called the Pensées. Through his endeavor to describe and defend Christianity in a compelling way, Pascal ended up giving the world some of the most profound descriptions of the human condition. Predating both Psychoanalysis and Existentialism, his work describes many of the themes that would become so central to these movements, such as the power of self-deception, the anxiety of freedom and the dizzying experience of feeling both the splendor and insignificance of existence. Basically, it’s a intellectual rollercoaster.

In this five part course, we’ll take a deep dive into Pascal’s Pensées, wrestling with its themes and seeing how they might both illuminate and impact our lives.

Course Schedule:

1. Deception and Distraction - June 25th
2. Without a Compass or a Map - July 16th
3. The Gambler and the Machine - July 23rd
4. Rethinking the God Shaped Hole - July 30th
5. Class Presentations (optional) - August 20th

All classes will commence at 10 am PST (1 pm EDT, 6 pm BST). Recordings of each session will be available, allowing you to watch live or later. I recommend A.J. Krailsheimer’s translation of Pensées (readings will be assigned from that translation).

How to Join:

Go here to join - https://www.patreon.com/peterrollins for $20.00 / month.

This course is open to everyone who supports me at Blaze level on Patreon. By supporting me on Patreon, you not only enable me to dedicate myself fully to this work, but you also get access to hundreds of hours of archived material, along with regular book studies, hangouts, and other events.

Hope you can join me!

The Child Prodigy, Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal

French philosopher and scientist

article link

[abridged edits and re-organization of article are mine - re slater]

Written by Jean Orcibal, Lucien Jerphagnon

Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Jun 15, 2023 • Article History

Born: June 19, 1623 Clermont-Ferrand, France

Died: August 19, 1662 (aged 39) Paris, France

Inventions

Pascaline

Notable Work

“Essai pour les coniques”

“Les Provinciales”

“Pensées”

“The Physical Treatises of Pascal”

“Traité du triangle arithmétique”...

Subjects Of Study

Pascal’s principle

Pascal’s theorem

Pascal’s triangle

conic section

cycloid

Blaise Pascal, (born June 19, 1623, Clermont-Ferrand, France—died August 19, 1662, Paris), French mathematician, physicist, religious philosopher, and master of prose.

He laid the foundation for the modern theory of probabilities, formulated what came to be known as Pascal’s principle of pressure, and propagated a religious doctrine that taught the experience of God through the heart rather than through reason. 

The establishment of his principle of intuitionism [(feeling? - re slater)] had an impact on such later philosophers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henri Bergson and also on the Existentialists.

Pascal’s life to the Port-Royal years

Pascal’s father, Étienne Pascal, was presiding judge of the tax court at Clermont-Ferrand. His mother died in 1626, and in 1631 the family moved to Paris. Étienne, who was respected as a mathematician, devoted himself henceforth to the education of his children.

While his sister Jacqueline (born in 1625) figured as an infant prodigy in literary circles, Blaise proved himself no less precocious in mathematics. In 1640 he wrote an essay on conic sections, Essai pour les coniques, based on his study of the now classical work of Girard Desargues on synthetic projective geometry.

The young man’s work, which was highly successful in the world of mathematics, aroused the envy of no less a personage than the great French Rationalist and mathematician René Descartes.

Pascaline

Between 1642 and 1644, Pascal conceived and constructed a calculating device, the Pascaline, to help his father—who in 1639 had been appointed intendant (local administrator) at Rouen—in his tax computations. The machine was regarded by Pascal’s contemporaries as his main claim to fame, and with reason, for in a sense it was the first digital calculator since it operated by counting integers. The significance of this contribution explains the youthful pride that appears in his dedication of the machine to the chancellor of France, Pierre Seguier, in 1644.

Blaise Pascal conducting experiments

Blaise Pascal

Until 1646 the Pascal family held strictly Roman Catholic principles, though they often substituted l’honnêteté (“polite respectability”) for inward religion. 

An illness of his father, however, brought Blaise into contact with a more profound expression of religion, for he met two disciples of the abbé de Saint-Cyran, who, as director of the convent of Port-Royal, had brought the austere moral and theological conceptions of Jansenism into the life and thought of the convent.

Jansenism was a 17th-century form of Augustinianism in the Roman Catholic Church. It repudiated free will, accepted predestination, and taught that divine grace, rather than good works, was the key to salvation. [Of the three, process theology is argues for, and is based upon, freewill, rejects predestination in favor of a divinely open present and future, and elevates divine grace - re slater]

The convent at Port-Royal had become the centre for the dissemination of the doctrine. Pascal himself was the first to feel the necessity of entirely turning away from the world to God, and he won his family over to the spiritual life in 1646. His letters indicate that for several years he was his family’s spiritual adviser, but the conflict within himself—between the world and ascetic life—was not yet resolved. 

Absorbed again in his scientific interests, he tested the theories of Galileo and Evangelista Torricelli (an Italian physicist who discovered the principle of the barometer). To do so, he reproduced and amplified experiments on atmospheric pressure by constructing mercury barometers and measuring air pressure, both in Paris and on the top of a mountain overlooking Clermont-Ferrand.

These tests paved the way for further studies in hydrodynamics and hydrostatics. While experimenting, Pascal invented the syringe and created the hydraulic press, an instrument based upon the principle that became known as Pascal’s principle: pressure applied to a confined liquid is transmitted undiminished through the liquid in all directions regardless of the area to which the pressure is applied. His publications on the problem of the vacuum (1647–48) added to his reputation. 

When he fell ill from overwork, his doctors advised him to seek distractions; but what has been described as Pascal’s “worldly period” (1651–54) was, in fact, primarily a period of intense scientific work, during which he composed treatises on the equilibrium of liquid solutions, on the weight and density of air, and on the arithmetic triangle: Traité de l’équilibre des liqueurs et de la pesanteur de la masse de l’air (Eng. trans., The Physical Treatises of Pascal, 1937) and also his Traité du triangle arithmétique [Treatise of Triangle Arithmatic - re slater]. In [his] last treatise, a fragment of the De Alea Geometriae, [Of Angular Geometry? - re slater], he laid the foundations for the calculus of probabilities.

By the end of 1653, however, he had begun to feel religious scruples; and the “night of fire,” an intense, perhaps mystical “conversion” that he experienced on November 23, 1654, he believed to be the beginning of a new life.

He entered Port-Royal in January 1655, and though he never became one of the solitaires, he thereafter wrote only at their request and never again published in his own name. The two works for which he is chiefly known, Les Provinciales and the Pensées, date from the years of his life spent at Port-Royal.

Les Provinciales of Blaise Pascal

Written in defense of Antoine Arnauld, an opponent of the Jesuits and a defender of Jansenism who was on trial before the faculty of theology in Paris for his controversial religious works, Pascal’s 18 Lettres écrites par Louis de Montalte à un provincial deal with divine grace and the ethical code of the Jesuits. 

They are better known as Les Provinciales (“The Provincial Letters”). They included a blow against the relaxed morality that the Jesuits were said to teach and that was the weak point in their controversy with Port-Royal; Pascal quotes freely Jesuit dialogues and discrediting quotations from their own works, sometimes in a spirit of derision, sometimes with indignation. In the two last letters, dealing with the question of grace, Pascal proposed a conciliatory position that was later to make it possible for Port-Royal to subscribe to the “Peace of the Church,” a temporary cessation of the conflict over Jansenism, in 1668.

The Provinciales were an immediate success, and their popularity has remained undiminished. This they owe primarily to their form, in which for the first time bombast and tedious rhetoric are replaced by variety, brevity, tautness, and precision of style; as Nicolas Boileau, the founder of French literary criticism, recognized, they marked the beginning of modern French prose.

Something of their popularity, moreover, in fashionable, Protestant, or skeptical circles, must be attributed to the violence of their attack on the Jesuits. In England they have been most widely read when Roman Catholicism has seemed a threat to the Church of England.

Yet they have also helped Catholicism to rid itself of laxity; and, in 1678, Pope Innocent XI himself condemned half of the propositions that Pascal had denounced earlier. Thus, the Provinciales played a decisive part in promoting a return to inner religion and helped to secure the eventual triumph of the ideas set forth in Antoine Arnauld’s treatise De la fréquente communion (1643), in which he protested against the idea that the profligate could atone for continued sin by frequent communion without repentance, a thesis that thereafter remained almost unchallengeable until the French church felt the repercussion of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (which had granted religious freedom to French Protestants) in 1685.

Whereas the Jesuits seemed to represent a Counter-Reformation predominantly concerned with orthodoxy and obedience to ecclesiastical authority, the Provinciales advocated a more spiritual approach, emphasizing the soul’s union with the Mystical Body of Christ through charity.

Further, by rejecting any double standard of morality and the distinction between counsel and precept, Pascal aligned himself with those who believe the ideal of evangelical perfection to be inseparable from the Christian life.

Although there was nothing original in these opinions, Pascal nevertheless stamped them with the passionate conviction of a man in love with the absolute, of a man who saw no salvation apart from a heartfelt desire for the truth, together with a love of God that works continually toward destroying all self-love.

For Pascal, morality cannot be separated from spirituality. Moreover, his own spiritual development can be traced in the Provinciales. The religious sense in them becomes progressively refined after the first letters, in which the tone of ridicule is smart rather than charitable.

Pensées

Pascal finally decided to write his work of Christian apologetics, Apologie de la religion chrétienne, as a consequence of his meditations on miracles and other proofs of Christianity. The work remained unfinished at his death. Between the summers of 1657 and 1658, he put together most of the notes and fragments that editors have published under the inappropriate title Pensées (“Thoughts”).

In the Apologie, Pascal shows the man without grace to be an incomprehensible mixture of greatness and abjectness, incapable of truth or of reaching the supreme good to which his nature nevertheless aspires. A religion that accounts for these contradictions, which he believed philosophy and worldliness fail to do, is for that very reason “to be venerated and loved.” 

"The indifference of the skeptic," Pascal wrote, "is to be overcome by means of the “wager”: if God does not exist, the skeptic loses nothing by believing in him; but if he does exist, the skeptic gains eternal life by believing in him." Pascal insists that men must be brought to God through Jesus Christ alone, because a creature could never know the infinite if Jesus had not descended to assume the proportions of man’s fallen state.

The second part of the work applies the Augustinian theory of allegorical interpretation to the biblical types (figuratifs); reviews the rabbinical texts, the persistence of true religion, the work of Moses, and the proofs concerning Jesus Christ’s God-like role; and, finally, gives a picture of the primitive church and the fulfillment of the prophecies. The Apologie (Pensées) is a treatise on spirituality. Pascal was not interested in making converts if they were not going to be saints.

Pascal’s apologetics, though it has stood the test of time, is primarily addressed to individuals of his own acquaintance. To convert his libertine friends, he looked for arguments in their favourite authors: in Michel de Montaigne, in the Skeptic Pierre Charron, in the Epicurean Pierre Gassendi, and in Thomas Hobbes, an English political philosopher. For Pascal, Skepticism was but a stage. Modernist theologians in particular have tried to make use of his main contention, that [i] “man is infinitely more than man,” in isolation from his other contention, that [ii] man’s wretchedness is explicable only as the effect of a Fall, about which a man can learn what he needs to know from history. In so doing, they sacrifice the second part of the Apologie to the first, keeping the philosophy while losing the exegesis. For Pascal, as for St. Paul, Jesus Christ is the second Adam, inconceivable without the first.

Finally, too, Pascal expressly admitted that his psychological analyses were not by themselves sufficient to exclude a “philosophy of the absurd”; to do so, it is necessary to have recourse to the convergence of these analyses with the “lines of fact” concerning revelation, this convergence being too extraordinary not to appear as the work of providence to an anguished seeker after truth (qui cherche en gémissant).

He was next again involved in scientific work:

First, the “Messieurs de Port-Royal” themselves asked for his help in composing the Élements de géométrie; and second, it was suggested that he should publish what he had discovered about cycloid curves, a subject on which the greatest mathematicians of the time had been working.

Once more fame aroused in him feelings of self-esteem; but from February 1659, illness brought him back to his former frame of mind, and he composed the “prayer for conversion” that the English clergymen Charles and John Wesley, who founded the Methodist Church, were later to regard so highly.

Scarcely capable of regular work, he henceforth gave himself over to helping the poor and to the ascetic and devotional life. He took part intermittently, however, in the disputes to which the “Formulary”—a document condemning five propositions of Jansenism that, at the demand of the church authorities, had to be signed before a person could receive the sacraments—gave rise. Finally a difference of opinion with the theologians of Port-Royal led him to withdraw from controversy, though he did not sever his relations with them.

Pascal died in 1662 after suffering terrible pain, probably from carcinomatous meningitis [a form of brain cancer - re slater] following a malignant ulcer of the stomach. He was assisted by a non-Jansenist parish priest.

Legacy of Blaise Pascal

At once a physicist, a mathematician, an eloquent publicist in the Provinciales, and an inspired artist in the Apologie and in his private notes, Pascal was embarrassed by the very abundance of his talents.

It has been suggested that it was his too concrete turn-of-mind that prevented his discovering the infinitesimal calculus; and in some of the Provinciales the mysterious relations of human beings with God are treated as if they were a geometrical problem.

But these considerations are far outweighed by the profit that he drew from the multiplicity of his gifts; his religious writings are rigorous because of his scientific training; and his love of the concrete emerges no less from the stream of quotations in the Provinciales than from his determination to reject the vigorous method of attack that he had used so effectively in his Apologie.

Integral Studies with Matthew Segall

 

https://footnotes2plato.com/

MATTHEW D. SEGALL

"The safest general characterization of the philosophical tradition is that it

consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." - Alfred North Whitehead

"Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought

has done its best, the wonder remains." - Alfred North Whitehead

Advanced Seminar - A. N. Whitehead's Process and Reality

Professor Matthew T. Segall

By the mid-1920s, the new quantum and relativity theories had already succeeded in turning the old mechanical philosophy of Nature inside out by transforming matter into light and merging space and time together with gravity. The classical explanations of Nature offered by a once confident scientific materialism no longer made any sense. A second scientific revolution was afoot. At the same time, in philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein tried to close the door to further metaphysical speculation upon the ultimate nature of things: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” The physicists struggling to come to terms with their discoveries could henceforth expect no help from philosophers. In protest against the logical positivism of his era, which decided to give up on understanding Nature and withdraw into the analysis of scientific formalisms and statistics, Whitehead awoke from the dogmatic slumber of the Newtonian paradigm and attempted to make natural science philosophical again. He sought novel insight into depths of reality as yet unspoken. In Process & Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, Whitehead aims for nothing less than the construction of an organic system of the universe that not only brings quantum and relativity theories into coherence, but gathers up scientific truths, aesthetic feelings, and religious values into an integral vision of the whole.

Students in this advanced seminar will engage in a close reading of Whitehead’s (350 page) “essay.” This text is widely considered to be one of the most obscure in the Western tradition. That is perhaps because Whitehead’s organic and process-relational way of seeing the world is so unusual. He often found it necessary to invent new words, or to use old words in new ways. His text will be supplemented with secondary readings by scholars skilled at elucidating the finer points of the “philosophy of organism” (e.g., Isabelle Stengers, Randall Auxier and Gary Herstein, Catherine Keller). (3 Units)

EXTERNAL RESOURCES

Resume, Contributions, Articles, and Publicastions -

https://matthewsegall.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/copyofmodernresume-17.pdf

CIIS Videos with Matthew Segall -

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWq2UzigYICgZSUrYRsI6Khvyvk_ZGD5M

Footnotes to Plato - Lectures Archive by Matthew Segall - 

https://footnotes2plato.com/lectures/

Philosophical Essays by Matthew Segall - 

https://footnotes2plato.com/essays/

Online Courses by Matthew Segall - 

https://footnotes2plato.com/online-courses/

Wikipedia - Incompatibilism & Compatibilism

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Incompatibilism

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Incompatibilists agree that determinism leaves no room for free will. As a result, they reject one or both.

Incompatibilism is the view that a deterministic universe is completely at odds with the notion that persons have a free will; that there is a dichotomy between determinism and free will where philosophers must choose one or the other. This view is pursued in at least three ways: libertarians deny that the universe is deterministic, the hard determinists deny that any free will exists, and pessimistic incompatibilists (hard indeterminists) deny both that the universe is determined and that free will exists.

Incompatibilism is contrasted with compatibilism, which rejects the determinism/free will dichotomy.

Contents

• 1Libertarianism
• 2Hard determinism
  • 2.1Moral implications
• 3Hard incompatibilism
• 4Experimental research
• 5See also
• 6References
• 7External links

Libertarianism

Main article: libertarianism (metaphysics)

Metaphysical libertarianism argues that free will is real and that determinism is false. Such dualism risks an infinite regress however;^[1] if any such mind is real, an objection can still be raised using the standard argument against free will^{[clarification needed]} that it is shaped by a necessity or chance.^{[clarification needed]} Libertarian Robert Kane (among others) presented an alternative model:

Robert Kane (editor of the Oxford Handbook of Free Will) is a leading incompatibilist philosopher in favour of free will. Kane seeks to hold persons morally responsible for decisions that involved indeterminism in their process. Critics maintain that Kane fails to overcome the greatest challenge to such an endeavor: "the argument from luck".^[2] Namely, if a critical moral choice is a matter of luck (indeterminate quantum fluctuations), then on what grounds can we hold a person responsible for their final action? Moreover, even if we imagine that a person can make an act of will ahead of time, to make the moral action more probable in the upcoming critical moment, this act of 'willing' was itself a matter of luck.

Libertarianism in the philosophy of mind is unrelated to the like-named political philosophy. It suggests that we actually do have free will, that it is incompatible with determinism, and that therefore the future is not determined. For example, at this moment, one could either continue reading this article if one wanted, or cease. Under this assertion, being that one could do either, the fact of how the history of the world will continue to unfold is not currently determined one way or the other.

One famous proponent of this view was Lucretius, who asserted that the free will arises out of the random, chaotic movements of atoms, called "clinamen". One major objection to this view is that science has gradually shown that more and more of the physical world obeys completely deterministic laws, and seems to suggest that our minds are just as much part of the physical world as anything else. If these assumptions are correct, incompatibilist libertarianism can only be maintained as the claim that free will is a supernatural phenomenon, which does not obey the laws of nature (as, for instance, maintained by some religious traditions).

However, many libertarian view points now rely upon an indeterministic view of the physical universe, under the assumption that the idea of a deterministic, "clockwork" universe has become outdated since the advent of quantum mechanics.^{[citation needed]} By assuming an indeterministic universe libertarian philosophical constructs can be proposed under the assumption of physicalism.

There are libertarian view points based upon indeterminism and physicalism, which is closely related to naturalism.^[3] A major problem for naturalistic libertarianism is to explain how indeterminism can be compatible with rationality and with appropriate connections between an individual's beliefs, desires, general character and actions. A variety of naturalistic libertarianism is promoted by Robert Kane,^[4][5] who emphasizes that if our character is formed indeterministically (in "self-forming actions"), then our actions can still flow from our character, and yet still be incompatibilistically free.

Alternatively, libertarian view points based upon indeterminism have been proposed without the assumption of naturalism. At the time C. S. Lewis wrote Miracles,^[6] quantum mechanics (and physical indeterminism) was only in the initial stages of acceptance, but still Lewis stated the logical possibility that, if the physical world was proved to be indeterministic, this would provide an entry (interaction) point into the traditionally viewed closed system, where a scientifically described physically probable/improbable event could be philosophically described as an action of a non-physical entity on physical reality (noting that, under a physicalist point of view, the non-physical entity must be independent of the self-identity or mental processing of the sentient being). Lewis mentions this only in passing, making clear that his thesis does not depend on it in any way.

Others may use some form of Donald Davidson's anomalous monism to suggest that although the mind is in fact part of the physical world, it involves a different level of description of the same facts, so that although there are deterministic laws under the physical description, there are no such laws under the mental description, and thus our actions are free and not determined.^[7]

Hard determinism

Schopenhauer said "Man is free to do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills" The Hard Determinist says that obviously, then, there is no 'free will'

Main article: hard determinism

Those who reject free will and accept determinism are variously known as "hard determinists", hard incompatibilists, free will skeptics, illusionists, or impossibilists. They believe that there is no 'free will' and that any sense of the contrary is an illusion.^[8] Of course, hard determinists do not deny that one has desires, but say that these desires are causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences. According to this philosophy, no wholly random, spontaneous, mysterious, or miraculous events occur. Determinists sometimes assert that it is stubborn to resist scientifically motivated determinism on purely intuitive grounds about one's own sense of freedom. They reason that the history of the development of science suggests that determinism is the logical method in which reality works.

William James said that philosophers (and scientists) have an "antipathy to chance."^[9] Absolute chance, a possible implication of quantum mechanics and the indeterminacy principle, implies a lack of causality.^{[citation needed]} This possibility often disturbs those who assume there must be a causal and lawful explanation for all events.

Moral implications

Since many believe that free will is necessary for moral responsibility, this may imply disastrous consequences for their theory of ethics.

As something of a solution to this predicament, it has been suggested that, for the sake of preserving moral responsibility and the concept of ethics, one might embrace the so-called "illusion" of free will. This, despite thinking that free will does not exist according to determinism. Critics argue that this move renders morality merely another "illusion", or else that this move is simply hypocritical.

The Determinist will add that, even if denying free will does mean morality is incoherent, such an unfortunate result has no effect on the truth. Note, however, that hard determinists often have some sort of 'moral system' that relies explicitly on determinism. A Determinist's moral system simply bears in mind that every person's actions in a given situation are, in theory, predicted by the interplay of environment and upbringing. For instance, the Determinist may still punish undesirable behaviours for reasons of behaviour modification or deterrence.

Hard incompatibilism

Hard incompatibilism, like hard determinism, is a type of skepticism about free will. 'Hard incompatibilism' is a term coined by Derk Pereboom to designate the view that both determinism and indeterminism are incompatible with having free will and moral responsibility.^[10] Like the hard determinist, the hard incompatibilist holds that if determinism were true, our having free will would be ruled out. But Pereboom argues in addition that if our decisions were indeterministic events, free will would also be precluded. In his view, free will is the control in action required for the desert aspect of moral responsibility—for our deserving to be blamed or punished for immoral actions, and to be praised or rewarded for morally exemplary actions. He contends that if our decisions were indeterministic events, their occurrence would not be in the control of the agent in the way required for such attributions of desert.^[11] The possibility for free will that remains is libertarian agent causation, according to which agents as substances (thus not merely as having a role in events) can cause actions without being causally determined to do so. Pereboom argues that for empirical reasons it is unlikely that we are agent causes of this sort, and that as a result, it is likely that we lack free will.^[12]

Experimental research

In recent years researchers in the field of experimental philosophy have been working on determining whether ordinary people, who aren't experts in this field, naturally have compatibilist or incompatibilist intuitions about determinism and moral responsibility.^[13] Some experimental work has even conducted cross-cultural studies.^[14] The debate about whether people naturally have compatibilist or incompatibilist intuitions has not come out overwhelmingly in favor of one view or the other. Still, there has been some evidence that people can naturally hold both views. For instance, when people are presented with abstract cases which ask if a person could be morally responsible for an immoral act when they could not have done otherwise, people tend to say no, or give incompatibilist answers, but when presented with a specific immoral act that a specific person committed, people tend to say that that person is morally responsible for their actions, even if they were determined (that is, people also give compatibilist answers).^[15]

See also

• Daniel Dennett's Freedom Evolves
• Daniel Dennett's Elbow Room
• Frankfurt cases
• Indeterminism
• Lucretius's On the Nature of Things
• Molinism
• Philosophical zombie
• Tychism

References

1. ^ Libertarian free will asserts that human actions do not have causes and are chosen consciously - i.e. are not random. This begs the question: what causes these actions? Since they can't be chosen at random by, as explained above, this question can be asked for each subsequent answer to it, thus forming an infinite regress. Similarly, in the 20th century, in the Frankfurt's concept of hierarchical mesh. Similarly, G. Strawson (1998, 2004), Free will, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
2. ^ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-theories/
3. ^ Williams, Peter S. (Summer 2002). "Why Naturalists Should Mind about Physicalism, and Vice Versa". Quodlibet. 4 (2–3). Archived from the original on 2011-05-25. Retrieved 2010-08-28.
4. ^ summary of Kane's views by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
5. ^ Kane, Robert. “Free Will: New Directions for an Ancient Problem.” (2003). In Free Will, Robert Kane (ed.) (2003) Malden, MA: Blackwell
6. ^ Lewis, C.S. (1947). Miracles. p. 24. ISBN 0-688-17369-1.
7. ^ Sosa -- Free Mental Causation! (MS Word)^{[permanent dead link]}
8. ^ Saul Smilansky, Free Will and Illusion, Oxford, 2000
9. ^ William James, The Dilemma of Determinism, p.153
10. ^ Pereboom, Derk (2001). Living without Free Will. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
11. ^ Pereboom, Derk (2014). Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
12. ^ Derk Pereboom, "Defending Hard incompatibilism", Midwest Studies 29 (2005), pp. 228–47.
13. ^ Eddy Nahmias, Stephen Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer, and Jason Turner. (forthcoming).Incompatibilism Intuitive?,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
14. ^ Hagop Sarkissian, Amita Chatterjee, Felipe De Brigard, Joshua Knobe, Shaun Nichols, Smita Sirker (forthcoming)."Is belief in free will a cultural universal?" Mind & Language
15. ^ Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe. (forthcoming).“Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions.” Archived December 11, 2009, at the Wayback Machine Nous.

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Compatibilism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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This article is about the philosophical view on free will. For other uses, see Compatibility.

Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are mutually compatible and that it is possible to believe in both without being logically inconsistent.^[1]

Compatibilists believe freedom can be present or absent in situations for reasons that have nothing to do with metaphysics.^[2] They say causal determinism does not exclude the truth of possible future outcomes.^[3]

Similarly, political liberty is a non-metaphysical concept.^[4] Statements of political liberty, such as the United States Bill of Rights, assume moral liberty: the ability to choose to do otherwise than one does.^[5]

Contents

• 1History
• 2Defining free will
  • 2.1Alternatives as imaginary
  • 2.2Non-naturalism
• 3Criticism
• 4See also
• 5References

History

Compatibilism was championed by the ancient Stoics^[6] and some medieval scholastics (such as Thomas Aquinas). More specifically, scholastics like Thomas Aquinas and later Thomists (such as Domingo Báñez) are often interpreted as holding that a human action can be free even though the agent in some strong sense could not do otherwise than he did. Whereas Aquinas is often interpreted to maintain rational compatibilism (i.e., an action can be determined by rational cognition and yet free), later Thomists such as Báñez develop a sophisticated theory of theological determinism, according to which actions of free agents, despite being free, are, on a higher level, determined by infallible divine decrees manifested in the form of "physical premotion" (praemotio physica), a deterministic intervention of God into the will of a free agent required to reduce the will from potency to act. A strong incompatibilist view of freedom was, on the other hand, developed in the Franciscan tradition, especially by Duns Scotus, and later upheld and further developed by Jesuits, esp. Luis de Molina and Francisco Suárez. In the early-modern era, compatibilism was maintained by Enlightenment philosophers (such as David Hume and Thomas Hobbes).^[7]

During the 20th century, compatibilists presented novel arguments that differed from the classical arguments of Hume, Hobbes, and John Stuart Mill.^[8] Importantly, Harry Frankfurt popularized what are now known as Frankfurt counterexamples to argue against incompatibilism,^[9] and developed a positive account of compatibilist free will based on higher-order volitions.^[10] Other "new compatibilists" include Gary Watson, Susan R. Wolf, P. F. Strawson, and R. Jay Wallace.^[11] Contemporary compatibilists range from the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, particularly in his works Elbow Room (1984) and Freedom Evolves (2003), to the existentialist philosopher Frithjof Bergmann. Perhaps the most renowned contemporary defender of compatibilism is John Martin Fischer.

Defining free will

Arthur Schopenhauer

Compatibilists often define an instance of "free will" as one in which the agent had freedom to act according to their own motivation. That is, the agent was not coerced or restrained. Arthur Schopenhauer famously said, "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills."^[12] In other words, although an agent may often be free to act according to a motive, the nature of that motive is determined. This definition of free will does not rely on the truth or falsity of causal determinism.^[2] This view also makes free will close to autonomy, the ability to live according to one's own rules, as opposed to being submitted to external domination.

Alternatives as imaginary

Saying "there may be a person behind that door" merely expresses ignorance about the one, determined reality

Some compatibilists will hold both causal determinism (all effects have causes) and logical determinism (the future is already determined) to be true. Thus statements about the future (e.g., "it will rain tomorrow") are either true or false when spoken today. This compatibilist free will should not be understood as some kind of ability to have actually chosen differently in an identical situation. A compatibilist can believe that a person can choose between many choices, but the choice is always determined by external factors.^[13] If the compatibilist says "I may visit tomorrow, or I may not", he is saying that he does not know what he will choose—if he will choose to follow the subconscious urge to go or not.

Non-naturalism

Not to be confused with Religious naturalism.

Alternatives to strictly naturalist physics, such as mind–body dualism positing a mind or soul existing apart from one's body while perceiving, thinking, choosing freely, and as a result acting independently on the body, include both traditional religious metaphysics and less common newer compatibilist concepts.^[14] Also consistent with both autonomy and Darwinism,^[15] they allow for free personal agency based on practical reasons within the laws of physics.^[16] While less popular among 21st century philosophers, non-naturalist compatibilism is present in most if not almost all religions.^[17]

Criticism

Compatibilism has much in common with so-called "hard determinism", including moral systems and a belief in determinism itself

A prominent criticism of compatibilism is Peter van Inwagen's consequence argument.

Critics of compatibilism often focus on the definition(s) of free will: incompatibilists may agree that the compatibilists are showing something to be compatible with determinism, but they think that this something ought not to be called "free will". Incompatibilists might accept the "freedom to act" as a necessary criterion for free will, but doubt that it is sufficient. Basically, they demand more of "free will". The incompatibilists believe free will refers to genuine (e.g., absolute, ultimate) alternate possibilities for beliefs, desires, or actions, rather than merely counterfactual ones.

Compatibilism is sometimes called soft determinism (William James's term) pejoratively.^[18] James accused them of creating a "quagmire of evasion" by stealing the name of freedom to mask their underlying determinism.^[18] Immanuel Kant called it a "wretched subterfuge" and "word jugglery".^[19] Kant's argument turns on the view that, while all empirical phenomena must result from determining causes, human thought introduces something seemingly not found elsewhere in nature—the ability to conceive of the world in terms of how it ought to be, or how it might otherwise be. For Kant, subjective reasoning is necessarily distinct from how the world is empirically. Because of its capacity to distinguish is from ought, reasoning can 'spontaneously' originate new events without being itself determined by what already exists.^[20] It is on this basis that Kant argues against a version of compatibilism in which, for instance, the actions of the criminal are comprehended as a blend of determining forces and free choice, which Kant regards as misusing the word "free". Kant proposes that taking the compatibilist view involves denying the distinctly subjective capacity to re-think an intended course of action in terms of what ought to happen.^[19]

Ted Honderich explains his view that the mistake of compatibilism is to assert that nothing changes as a consequence of determinism, when clearly we have lost the life-hope of origination.^{[21][clarification needed]}

See also

• Libertarianism (metaphysics)
• Semicompatibilism

References

1. ^ Coates, D. Justin; McKenna, Michael (February 25, 2015). "Compatibilism". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved May 10, 2016.
2. ^ Jump up to:^a b Podgorski, Daniel (October 16, 2015). "Free Will Twice Defined: On the Linguistic Conflict of Compatibilism and Incompatibilism". The Gemsbok. Retrieved March 7, 2016.
3. ^ McKenna, Michael and Coates, D. Justin, "Compatibilism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = .
4. ^ Locke, John (1690). The Second Treatise of Civil Government.
5. ^ The Monist, Vol. 70, No. 4, Thomas Reid and His Contemporaries (OCTOBER 1987), pp. 442-452 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27903049 Accessed: 06-12-2019 22:28 UTC
6. ^ Ricardo Salles, "Compatibilism: Stoic and modern." Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 83.1 (2001): 1-23.
7. ^ Michael McKenna: Compatibilism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edward N. Zalta (ed.). 2009.
8. ^ Kane, Robert (2005). A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will. Oxford University Press. p. 93. ISBN 978-0-19-514970-8.
9. ^ Kane 2005, p. 83
10. ^ Kane 2005, p. 94
11. ^ Kane 2005, pp. 98, 101, 107, 109.
12. ^ Schopenhauer, Arthur (1945). "On the Freedom of the Will". The Philosophy of American History: The Historical Field Theory. Translated by Morris Zucker. p. 531.
13. ^ Harry G. Frankfurt (1969). "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility," Journal of Philosophy 66 (3):829-39.
14. ^ Ridge, Michael (3 February 2014). "Moral Non-Naturalism". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Retrieved 3 June 2019.
15. ^ Lemos, John (2002). "Evolution and Free Will: A Defense of Darwinian Non–naturalism". Metaphilosophy. 33 (4): 468–482. doi:10.1111/1467-9973.00240. ISSN 1467-9973.
16. ^ Nida-Rümelin, Julian (1 January 2019). "The Reasons Account of Free Will A Libertarian-Compatibilist Hybrid". Archiv fuer Rechts- und Sozialphilosphie. 105 (1): 3–10. doi:10.25162/arsp-2019-0001.
17. ^ Stump, Eleonore (1996). "Libertarian Freedom and the Principle of Alternative Possibilities". In Howard-Snyder, Daniel; Jordan, Jeff (eds.). Faith, Freedom, and Rationality. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. pp. 73–88.
18. ^ Jump up to:^a b James, William. 1884 "The Dilemma of Determinism", Unitarian Review, September, 1884. Reprinted in The Will to Believe, Dover, 1956, p.149
19. ^ Jump up to:^a b Kant, Immanuel 1788 (1952).The Critique of Practical Reason, in Great Books of the Western World, vol. 42, Kant, Univ. of Chicago, p. 332
20. ^ Kant, Immanuel 1781 (1949).The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Max Mueller, p. 448
21. ^ Honderich, Ted 1988 The Consequences of Determinism, p.169