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    Causes, Agents, Explanations, and Free Will
    Causes, Agents, Explanations, and Free Will
    Causes, Agents, Explanations, and Free Will
    Ebook384 pages5 hours

    Causes, Agents, Explanations, and Free Will

    By Martin Gerwin

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    About this ebook

    Many have thought that if everything is caused, human free will must be an illusion. This kind of determinism, however, is seemingly antithetical to our lived experience of the world.


    In Causes, Agents, Explanations, and Free Will, philosopher Martin Gerwin argues that there is no reason to doubt that we have free will rather, the illusion is that everything is caused in the same deterministic way. Our very idea of cause and effect is rooted in our experience of being agents who make things happen. But from this experience we derive not a single, unified idea of causation, but an idea with different variants.


    Gerwin traces the evolution of this agency view of causality in Western philosophy over the past three centuries. He explores its relation to the canons of scientific explanation and the findings of quantum mechanics. He also offers a brief formal development of a tensed modal logic that serves to articulate the distinctive sense of I can stemming from the experience of agency. The result is a fresh, innovative defence of the possibility of free will.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchway Publishing
    Release dateFeb 13, 2018
    ISBN9781480856837
    Causes, Agents, Explanations, and Free Will
    Author

    Martin Gerwin

    Martin Gerwin was born in England in 1940 and moved to Canada at the age of eleven. He holds a B.A. (Honors) degree from Queens University at Kingston, Ontario, and earned his Masters and doctoral degrees at Princeton University. He was a member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Manitoba from 1965 until his retirement in 2003. He and his wife Judith Rutledge live in Toronto, Canada.

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      Causes, Agents, Explanations, and Free Will - Martin Gerwin

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