Free Will and Mental Powers

Free will and mental disorder: Exploring the relationship

A link between mental disorder and freedom is clearly present in the introduction of the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). It mentions "an important loss of freedom" as one of the possible defining features of mental disorder. Meanwhile, it remains unclear how "an important loss of freedom" should be understood. In order to get a clearer view ...

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

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...

Compulsivity and free will.

‘‘The perfection of a science is shown in the perfection of its language,’’ Condillac said in 1746. A concept that is gaining in popularity and cropping up in scientific articles with increasing regularity is ‘‘compulsivity.’’ Off the cuff, the word ‘‘compulsive’’ makes us think of something that is controlled, repeated, inexorable, repetitive, imperative, stereotyped, and necessary—something y...