Faith is a vital topic in Christian theology. However, the concept is more complex than is assumed. John Stott writes: "One wonders if there is any Christian quality more misunderstood than faith." We demonstrate that Scripture uses faith in a variety of ways, including saving faith, false faith, miracle faith, empowering faith, and visionary faith. Failure to recognize this leads to serious error in both Arminianism and charismaticism. Included is an extended section on visionary faith that enables us to step out in courage, taking risks to pursue human plans to fulfill God's commands. In our defense of the fact that biblical faith must rest on biblical revelation, we critique the inclusivism of John Wesley, Billy Graham, and C. S. Lewis which claims salvation can be apart from a revelation of the Gospel. Finally, we demonstrate that the strength of our faith depends on reason, and the evidences it perceives and evaluates. There is no such thing as a biblical "leap of faith" apart from reason.
This title was first published in 2002: This book is an analysis of the ways in which mental states ground attributions of responsibility to persons. Particular features of the book include: attention to the agent’s epistemic capacity for beliefs about the foreseeable consequences of actions and omissions; attention to the essential role of emotions in prudential and moral reasoning; a conception of personal identity that can justify holding persons responsible at later times for actions performed at earlier times; an emphasis on neurobiology as the science that should inform our thinking about free will and responsibility; and the melding of literature on free will and responsibility in contemporary analytic philosophy with legal cases, abnormal psychology, neurology and psychiatry, which offers a richer texture to the general debate on the relevant issues.
Questions concerning free will are intertwined with issues in almost every area of philosophy, from metaphysics to philosophy of mind to moral philosophy, and are also informed by work in different areas of science (principally physics, neuroscience and social psychology). Free will is also a perennial concern of serious thinkers in theology and in non-western traditions. Because free will can be approached from so many different perspectives and has implications for so many debates, a comprehensive survey needs to encompass an enormous range of approaches. This book is the first to draw together leading experts on every aspect of free will, from those who are central to the current philosophical debates, to non-western perspectives, to scientific contributions and to those who know the rich history of the subject. Chapter 37 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
This collection provides a selection of the most essential contributions to the contemporary free will debate. Among the issues discussed and debated are skepticism and naturalism, alternate possibilities, the consequence argument, libertarian metaphysics, illusionism and revisionism, optimism and pessimism, neuroscience and free will, and experimental philosophy.
The new edition of this highly successful text will once again provide the ideal introduction to free will. This volume brings together some of the most influential contributions to the topic of free will during the past 50 years, as well as some notable recent work.
Robert Kane provides a critical overview of debates about free will of the past half century, relating this recent inquiry to the broader history of the free will issue and to vital currents of twentieth century thought. Kane also defends a traditional libertarian or incompatibilist view of free will (one that insists upon the incompatibility of free will and determinism), employing arguments that are both new to philosophy and that respond to contemporary developments in physics and biology, neuro science, and the cognitive and behavioral sciences.
Is Trump responsible for the January 6 insurrection? Are “white people” responsible for slavery? In Moral Responsibility beyond Our Fingertips: Collective Responsibility, Leaders, and Attributionism, Eugene Schlossberger expands, updates, and argues for the attributionist account of moral responsibility and agency and applies it to several pressing contemporary concerns: leaders’ responsibility for their followers' acts (and ordinary persons’ responsibility for their influence on others), collective responsibility, addiction, and responsibility for what we would have done. Moral agents are continuing worldviews in operation who are ultimately responsible for their worldviews and occasion-responsible for acts, events, and circumstances that occasion a judgment of responsibility. Agents can be responsible for many things beyond their fingertips—such as others' behavior that they enabled—that reveal something about their worldviews. The wide-ranging discussion addresses the responsibility of psychopaths; the nature of beliefs and desires; social convergence theory; twelve forms of subjectability (such as blame and owing an apology); queerness and moral internalism; the beneficiary pays principle; and much more. The result is a comprehensive picture of agency and responsibility.
In The Material Image, Donald H. Wacome sets out to reconcile the Christian faith and contemporary science by embracing, rather than evading, its naturalistic implications. The sciences are our best way to know ourselves and the world we inhabit, Wacome argues, but this does not make belief in miracles unreasonable. The sciences reveal that we are fully material beings, the product of unguided natural selection. God created human persons for the vocation of sharing in the everlasting Triune life and work, but this creation does not involve design. The mind is the embodied, socially situated brain. There is no immaterial soul; we are the material image of our transcendent Creator. This materialist conception does not preclude the resurrection of the body. The freedom that matters for the human creature is compatible with our being governed by the laws of nature. Morality and religion are natural, merely human, legacies of our evolutionary history, which God employs in pursuit of fellowship with us. Christians can faithfully and enthusiastically welcome the image of human beings given in contemporary science.
Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility investigates the philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism and their implications. Skepticism about free will and moral responsibility has been on the rise in recent years. In fact, a significant number of philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists now either doubt or outright deny the existence of free will and/or moral responsibility—and the list of prominent skeptics appears to grow by the day. Given the profound importance that the concepts of free will and moral responsibility hold in our lives—in understanding ourselves, society, and the law—it is important that we explore what is behind this new wave of skepticism. It is also important that we explore the potential consequences of skepticism for ourselves and society. Edited by Gregg D. Caruso, this collection of new essays brings together an internationally recognized line-up of contributors, most of whom hold skeptical positions of some sort, to display and explore the leading arguments for free will skepticism and to debate their implications.
This book explores moral responsibility, and whether it is compatible with causal determinism. Its author, K. E. Boxer, started out with deeply incompatibilist intuitions but became dissatisfied with the arguments that she and other contemporary incompatibilists marshalled in support of this view. Rethinking Responsibility has evolved out of her search for a more adequate argument. Boxer suggests that if incompatibilists are to be in a position to provide such an argument, they must shift their attention away from metaphysics and back to what H. L. A. Hart deemed the primary sense of the concept of moral responsibility, viz., the sense of liability. To say that an agent is morally responsible for an action in this sense is to say that she satisfies the necessary causal and capacity conditions for desert of certain forms of response. If incompatibilists are to show that among those conditions is a requirement for some form of ultimate responsibility incompatible with determinism, they must first clarify their understanding of moral desert and the moral responses associated with attributions of responsibility. The book examines different possible understandings of moral liability-responsibility based on different possible accounts of the nature of moral blame, the moral desert of punishment, and the relation between desert of moral blame and desert of punishment. A focal point throughout the discussion is whether, on any of the possible understandings, moral responsibility would require agents to be ultimately responsible for their actions in a way incompatible with causal determinism. Other issues discussed include what renders a defect a moral defect or a particular criticism a moral criticism, whether moral obligations are act-governing or will-governing, the connection between the moral reactive attitudes and the retributive sentiments, the relevance of the capacity to participate in ordinary interpersonal relationships, and whether it is possible to understand the moral desert of punishment in communicative terms. Boxer concludes that incompatibilists face an unenviable choice: either they must adopt an understanding of the moral desert of punishment that many find morally problematic, or they must abandon incompatibilism.
