Bogey of Determinism
نویسنده
چکیده
1. THE PROBLEM AND THE PROGRAMME Only a dreadful prig could seriously condemn secret lust as a form of adultery. However, even someone who claims to be wholly concerned with the things of the mind must have some interest in what he says and does, and these require the occurrence of bodily processes. Realising that so much of what matters to us involves physical events and processes, it is natural to find alarming the suggestion that all physical behaviour of our bodies can be explained in terms of the 'mindless' workings of laws of nature. Consequently, many philosophers have tried to prove it isn't so. More precisely, the attempt to refute physicalism (the theory that human bodies are physical systems) may be motivated by the assumption that it implies all the following: that all our actions are predictable; that mental phenomena are identical with or composed of physical phenomena; that all human actions have purely physical explanations; and that there is no room for beliefs, desires and other mental phenomena to influence our actions. I shall argue first of all that since the question whether human bodies are physical systems is an empirical one, attempts at philosophical refutation are futile, and secondly that physicalism does not have the implications just mentioned. This will require a
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