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Susanne Bobzien presents the definitive study of one of the most important intellectual legacies of the ancient Greek world: the Stoic theory of causal determinism. She identifies the main problems that the Stoics addressed and reconstructs the theory. She discusses how the Stoics squared their ...

Susanne Bobzien presents the definitive study of one of the most important intellectual legacies of the ancient Greek world: the Stoic theory of causal determinism. She identifies the main problems that the Stoics addressed and reconstructs the theory. She discusses how the Stoics squared their determinism with their conceptions of possibility, action, freedom, and moral responsibility, and how they defended it against objections and criticism by other philosophers. She shows how the Stoics distinguished their causal determinism from ancient theories of logical determinism, fatalism, and necessitarianism. Along the way she gives an authoritative account of many other related aspects of Stoic thought, including their views on the predictability of the future, the role of empirical sciences, the determination of character, and moral freedom. Bobzien's study of these central doctrines of Stoicism reveals the considerable philosophical richness and power that they retain today.

In The Consequences of Determinism, originally Part Three of the single-volume hardback edition, Honderich poses the following question: if determinism is true, and free will an illusion, what are the consequences? Honderich maintains that both of the entrenched and traditional doctrines about the ...

In The Consequences of Determinism, originally Part Three of the single-volume hardback edition, Honderich poses the following question: if determinism is true, and free will an illusion, what are the consequences? Honderich maintains that both of the entrenched and traditional doctrines about the consequences of determinism, Compatibilism and Incompatibilism, are provably false, and formulates a new answer to the question.

A new approach to the meaning of freedom.

To be free is to escape all limitations and obstacles -- or so we think at first. But if we probe further, we discover that freedom embraces its own necessities, a set of conditions without which it could not exist. Freedom's Embrace explores these ...

A new approach to the meaning of freedom.

To be free is to escape all limitations and obstacles -- or so we think at first. But if we probe further, we discover that freedom embraces its own necessities, a set of conditions without which it could not exist. Freedom's Embrace explores these necessities of freedom.

J. Melvin Woody surveys competing conceptions of freedom and traces debates about the nature and reality of freedom to confusions about knowledge, humanity, and nature that are rooted in some of the most fundamental assumptions of modern Western thought. The preemption of freedom as an exclusively human privilege with all nature relegated to mechanical necessity is a fatal error that renders both humanity and nature equally unintelligible. What distinguishes human beings from other animals is not freedom but the use of symbols, which vastly extends the range of available options and enables us to envision freedom as an ideal by which customary institutions and norms may be judged andtransformed.

By carefully surveying its necessary conditions and limitations, Woody reconciles the salient competing conceptions of freedom and weaves them together into a richer and broader theory that resolves old controversies and opens the way toward an ethics of freedom that can meet the challenges of relativism and nihilism that arise from recognizing the historicity and malleability of culture.