Do We Have Free Will?: If Determinism were True...
If determinism is true then would our ideas about moral responsibility and punishment have to change as well? Some philosophers contend that we have to think of ourselves as behaving freely even in a world in which there..
Do We Have Free Will?: Libertarian Perspective on Free Will
Libertarianism asserts we are free to act in other ways than we do. At any given moment it is possible to decide among alternative paths, but choosing one may mean that other options are no longer available. Ancient phil..
Do We Have Free Will?: Moral Responsibility and Free Will
In an attempt to reconcile science and free will, Immanuel Kant distinguishes between the phenomenal world of nature and the noumenal world of ideas in which morality and responsibility reside. It is in the noumenal worl..
Do We Have Free Will?: Question of Free Will, The
In Chicago in the 1920s, two 18-year old college students charged with killing a school boy are on trial for murder. Their defense attorney, Clarence Darrow, argue that they were doomed long before they committed their t..
Do We Have Free Will?: Theory of Determinism, The
The theory of determinism contends that human behavior, like every other physical phenomenon in the universe is determined by the laws of cause and effect rather than free will. The scientific advances of the 17th centur..
Documenting the face of America: Roy Stryker and the FSA/OWI photographers
Beginning in 1935, a group of New Deal-sponsored photographers roamed the American landscape, capturing the human face of the Great Depression. This film tells the story of the mammoth project, supervised by Roy Stryker ..
Does All Knowledge Come from Experience?: Berkeley's Solution to Locke's Gap
George Berkeley, the next major empiricist after Locke, makes the gap between the external world and our mental images of it central to his philosophy. Berkeley's solution is to say that bodies are simply collections of ..
Does All Knowledge Come from Experience?: Empiricism's Alliance with the Natural Sciences
Empiricists from Locke to the present feel a close alliance with the natural sciences, inspired by Newton's theories of science "inferred from the phenomena." One of the things that distinguishes empiricists from rationa..
Does All Knowledge Come from Experience?: Existence of an External Word...Real or Imagined?, The
Can we be certain our perceptions are backed up by an external world? Hume is skeptical. "Here experience is, and must be entirely silent." According to Hume we have no good reason for believing in the existence of an ex..
Does All Knowledge Come from Experience?: Hume and Causal Relationships
Consider the motion of billiard balls on a table. Can reason analyze how they will move a priori without previous experience as rationalists contend? Hume insists that the only way we know about patterns like cause and e..