Flanagan and Cartesian free will: a defense of agent causation

A study of Determinism and Free-will in Persian Proverbs

Proverbs as a part of colloquial literature are always nourished by religion, culture, traditions, and philosophical beliefs of a community, and thus they mirror the common beliefs of a people. The frequent repletion of a proverb pregnant with a specific thought makes that type of thought a behavioral pattern and affects the actions and behaviors of the people of a society. In the Iranian socie...

Natural Evil and the Free Will Defense

Recently Richard Swinburne has argued that the well-known Free Will Defense can provide an explanation of God's permitting moral evil (i.e., evil intentionally brought about by human agents) only if there is also natural evil (i.e., evil not intentionally brought about by human agents). 1 Ultimately his argument aims to show that there must be natural evil if we are to have the knowledge we nee...

Downward Causation and the Neurobiology of Free Will

The Scope of Man's Free Will

A . W . McCracken , Neil Flanagan , and Paul Flanagan

The infant was the second child of healthy parents. There was no history of congenital abnormalities in the family. The mother's pregnancy had been normal up to the thirty-second week, when uterine enlargement was found to be equivalent to that of a 36-week pregnancy. Radiographic examination showed a single foetus. A diagnosis of moderate hydramnios was made. The mother's blood group was B Rhe...