Free Will and Existentialism of Death

Kaufmann Existentialism and Death *

Existentialism is not a doctrine but a label widely used to lump together several philosophers and writers who are more or less opposed to doctrines while considering a few extreme experiences the best starting point for philosophic thinking. Spearheading the movement, Kierkegaard derided Hegel's system and wrote books on Fear and Trembling (1843), The Concept of Anxiety (1844), and The Sicknes...

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...

The Scope of Man's Free Will

Existentialism, Humanism and Psychotherapy

Authors of American psychology textbooks habitually refer to the “existential-humanistic” or “humanistic-existential” approach to treatment, while therapists in the UK and Europe say that this usage is inaccurate, and that the differences between the existential and humanistic approaches outweigh their similarities. To assess the merit of these competing claims, we must distinguish between lite...

Free Will and Moral Responsibility in Islamic Philosophy

According to a common view among Muslim philosophers, a moral agent has free will if and only if she is able to do an action when she wants to and is able to avoid it when she wants otherwise. Implicit in this view is the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP). On the other hand, according to this view, free will is dependent on requirements such as conception, judgement, tendency, decisi...