Search results for "free will"
showing 10 items of 21 documents
A Paradox in Compatibilist Accounts of Free Will and Moral Responsibility
1995
In this paper, it is argued that Frankfurt¿s sophisticated, ¿hierarchical¿ version of compatibilism faces the following paradox: a person with a highly disintegrated and incoherent value system will enjoy more freedom of the will than a person whose value system is more integrated and coherent. The reason is that the more (contrary) values a person embraces, the more likely will it be that s/he identifies with his or her first-order desires. The paradox, however, might also be extended to other versions of compatibilism.// En este artículo sostenemos que la versión refinada, ¿jerárquica¿ del compatibilismo, defendida por Harry Frankfurt se enfrenta a la siguiente paradoja: una persona con u…
Qué puede decir la neurociencia sobre el libre albedrío: cuestionando su metodología y la posibilidad de resolver el problema
2019
El antiguo problema de la libertad y el determinismo ha sido retomado en nuestros días por las neurociencias desde una perspectiva naturalista. Son muchos los problemas metodológicos y conceptuales a los que se enfrentan los investigadores al tratar de resolver científicamente la pregunta por la existencia del libre albedrío. Nuestro objetivo será someter a crítica uno de los presupuestos de estas investigaciones, la posibilidad de cuantificar la libertad como un hecho. Para ello expondremos en primer lugar las dificultades relativas a esta pretensión. Tras ello estableceremos cuáles son las condiciones de posibilidad de la libertad en aras de someter a crítica las perspectivas psicológica …
Logos, Pathos and Ethos in Ackroyd's Plato's Papers via an Interdisciplinary Psycho-philosophical Approach
2014
Abstract The present moral crisis of humanity will be closely considered in Ackroyd's Plato's Papers via Riemann's Theorem of Earth Mapping, Kelly's Personal Construct theory and Plato's Idea of the Third Man with a view to showing that only the generally assumed relationship between logos and ethos could rescue the mentality of the entire world and retrieve temporality and morality. For this approach to be successfully turned to good account the Aristotelian concepts of Logos (the thinking part of the intellect) mediating with Pathos (the feeling self) through the actions of his acting self, the personal Ethos, will be employed in relation to Ackroyd's character, Plato, the philosopher-ora…
Beyond free will : The embodied emergence of conscious agency
2019
Is it possible to reconcile the concept of conscious agency with the view that humans are biological creatures subject to material causality? The problem of conscious agency is complicated by the tendency to attribute autonomous powers of control to conscious processes. In this paper, we offer an embodied process model of conscious agency. We begin with the concept of embodied emergence – the idea that psychological processes are higher-order biological processes, albeit ones that exhibit emergent properties. Although consciousness, experience, and representation are emergent properties of higher-order biological organisms, the capacity for hierarchical regulation is a property of all livin…
Sfida al principio di imputazione. Una conversazione con Philip Zimbardo
2020
"Are we born free or do we become free?" is the core question of this essay: a conversation between the author and Philip Zimbardo, the social psychologist who conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most classical and debated experiment in social sciences. Zimbardo explored the so-called psychology of evil, isolating a number of situational factors that can induce the most abject actions in most human beings. The fact that murderers can be produced in the laboratory poses an insidious challenge to the classical categories of criminal law, in particular the assumption that imputability rests on the free will. The author compares her interlocutor's assertions with a number of le…
Freedom and Necessity in The Winter’s Tale
2014
From the first expository scene, The Winter’s Tale exhibits a concern with necessity, either through the use of the word itself, its derivatives (necessities, necessary), and their synonyms (needful, required) or through the notion of what “must” happen, what “cannot but” happen. The recurrence of such terms conveys a sense that this is a world where no one is free, and every action is dictated by force of circumstance. This is reinforced by the widespread use of the traditional imagery of fate. Yet the characters of the play are reluctant to submit to necessity. Some even fantasize states of absolute freedom, including freedom from the laws of nature. The play itself, notwithstanding the o…
The medicalization of suicide in 19th century Spain: theoretical, professional and cultural aspects
2012
This paper analyzes the medicalization process of suicide in Spain during the 19th century. It describes the transition of suicide seen as an act of free will to a model, developed by mental doctors, which considered it a pathological behavior. Against this model, other conservative positions from the fields of Law and Medicine continued to defend the traditional view. The initial interest of mental medicine regarding the social aspects of suicide was developed during this period. The social factor that authors considered to be the most influential to suicide was the loss of religious ideas, which was understandable considering that religion was very present in Spanish science and society t…
"Uma cruzada santa e humana que arrancará o crime do seu meio social": o socialismo penal de Afonso Costa
2023
Central but controversial figure of the First Portuguese Republic (1910-1926), Afonso Costa (1871-1937) was also a professor at the Faculty of Law in Coimbra, before leaving to found and direct the Faculty of Social Studies and Law in Lisbon in 1913. Although he taught civil law, political economy and judicial institutions, Costa attracted attention for his academic work in criminal law, where he displayed his socialist convictions. As a Portuguese representative of the 'socialism of jurists', he was, along with Filippo Turati, Napoleone Colajanni and Michelangelo Vaccaro, part of the socialist criminal 'school' (or social 'school' of criminal law), which was known to have discarded the not…
Elisabeth on Free Will, Preordination, and Philosophical Doubt
2021
Elisabeth is widely known as a critic of René Descartes' account of mind--body interaction and scholarly interpretations of her view on the will most often pose the question about the freedom of the will in relation to bodily impulses such as the passions. This chapter takes a different perspective and focuses on the problem of the compatibility of free will and providence, as it is discussed in a sequence of six letters that Elisabeth and Descartes wrote between September 1645 and January 1646. The chapter focuses on this specific metaphysical problem in order to ask what Elisabeth's remarks on the topic can tell about her general philosophical method as well as about her particular philos…
Incompatibilismo humanista: Una contrapropuesta del neuroabolicionismo penal
2021
El incompatibilismo humanista sostiene que el libre albedrío es un concepto incompatible con las verdades deterministas e indeterministas de la ciencia, pero plantea la dignidad humana como límite a cualquier desarrollo de la ciencia y la justicia. El presente artículo realiza un recorrido histórico y conceptual alrededor del determinismo, indeterminismo, compatibilismo e incompatibilismo. Posteriormente, introduce al problema que la neurociencia provoca para la teoría del delito y la culpabilidad penal. Más adelante, presenta algunas críticas al compatibilismo humanista y postula al incompatibilismo humanista como una contrapropuesta abolicionista del derecho penal. El artículo finaliza co…