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In Search of the Free Individual : The History of the Russian-Soviet Soul
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ISBN: 1501726919 1501726927 1501726900 Year: 2019 Publisher: Ithaca : Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Cornell University,

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"I love life in its living form, life that's found on the street, in human conversations, shouts, and moans." So begins this speech delivered in Russian at Cornell University by Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. In poetic language, Alexievich traces the origins of her deeply affecting blend of journalism, oral history, and creative writing.Cornell Global Perspectives is an imprint of Cornell University's Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. The works examine critical global challenges, often from an interdisciplinary perspective, and are intended for a non-specialist audience. The Distinguished Speaker Series presents edited transcripts of talks delivered at Cornell, both in the original language and in translation.


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Free will skepticism in law and society : challenging retributive justice
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ISBN: 1108666280 1108655580 1108493475 1108661262 Year: 2019 Publisher: Cambridge : Cambridge University Press,

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'Free will skepticism' refers to a family of views that all take seriously the possibility that human beings lack the control in action - i.e. the free will - required for an agent to be truly deserving of blame and praise, punishment and reward. Critics fear that adopting this view would have harmful consequences for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and laws. Optimistic free will skeptics, on the other hand, respond by arguing that life without free will and so-called basic desert moral responsibility would not be harmful in these ways, and might even be beneficial. This collection addresses the practical implications of free will skepticism for law and society. It contains eleven original essays that provide alternatives to retributive punishment, explore what (if any) changes are needed for the criminal justice system, and ask whether we should be optimistic or pessimistic about the real-world implications of free will skepticism.


Book
Free Will, Causality, and Neuroscience
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ISBN: 9004409963 9004372911 9789004409965 Year: 2019 Publisher: Brill

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Neuroscientists often consider free will to be an illusion. Contrary to this hypothesis, the contributions to this volume show that recent developments in neuroscience can also support the existence of free will. Firstly, the possibility of intentional consciousness is studied. Secondly, Libet’s experiments are discussed from this new perspective. Thirdly, the relationship between free will, causality and language is analyzed. This approach suggests that language grants the human brain a possibility to articulate a meaningful personal life. Therefore, human beings can escape strict biological determinism.


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The challenges of divine determinism : a philosophical analysis
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ISBN: 1108660436 1108696848 110848302X 1108656544 Year: 2019 Publisher: Cambridge : Cambridge University Press,

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In this volume, Peter Furlong delves into the question of divine determinism - the view that God has determined everything that has ever happened or will ever happen. This view, which has a long history among multiple religious and philosophical traditions, faces a host of counterarguments. It seems to rob humans of their free will, absolving them of all the wrongs they commit. It seems to make God the author of sin and thus blameworthy for all human wrongdoing. Additionally, it seems to undermine the popular 'Free Will Defense' of the problem of evil, to make a mockery of the claim that God loves us, and to make it inappropriate for God to blame and punish us. This work carefully formulates these and other objections to divine determinism and investigates possible responses to each of them, providing systematic and balanced discussion of this major philosophical and theological debate.


Book
Divine Omniscience and Human Free Will : A Logical and Metaphysical Analysis
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ISBN: 3030312992 303031300X Year: 2019 Publisher: Cham : Springer International Publishing : Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan,

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This book deals with an old conundrum: if God knows what we will choose tomorrow, how can we be free to choose otherwise? If all our choices are already written, is our freedom simply an illusion? This book provides a precise analysis of this dilemma using the tools of modern ontology and the logic of time. With a focus on three intertwined concepts - God’s nature, the formal structure of time, and the metaphysics time, including the relationship between temporal entities and a timeless God - the chapters analyse various solutions to the problem of foreknowledge and freedom, revealing the advantages and drawbacks of each. Building on this analysis, the authors advance constructive solutions, showing under what conditions an entity can be omniscient in the presence of free agents, and whether an eternal entity can know the tensed futures of the world. The metaphysics of time, its topology and the semantics of future tensed sentences are shown to be invaluable topics in dealing with this issue. Combining investigations into the metaphysics of time with the discipline of temporal logic this monograph brings about important advancements in the philosophical understanding of an ancient and fascinating problem. The answer, if any, is hidden in the folds of time, in the elusive nature of this feature of reality and in the infinite branching of our lives.


Book
Theology as freedom : on Martin Luther's "De servo arbitrio"
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ISBN: 9783161569753 316156975X 9783161569760 Year: 2019 Volume: 24 Publisher: Tübingen Mohr Siebeck

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Back cover: Andrea Vestrucci presents a pioneering analysis of Martin Luther's "De servo arbitrio", one of the most challenging works of Christian theology. From the hidden God to predestination, from justification to ontology, from logic to aesthetics the author explores a paradigm-shifting perspective on theological language.


Book
Determinism and Self-Organization of Human Perception and Performance
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ISBN: 3030288218 303028820X Year: 2019 Publisher: Cham : Springer International Publishing : Imprint: Springer,

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This book discusses human perception and performance within the framework of the theory of self-organizing systems. To that end, it presents a variety of phenomena and experimental findings in the research field, and provides an introduction to the theory of self-organization, with a focus on amplitude equations, order parameter and Lotka-Volterra equations. The book demonstrates that relating the experimental findings to the mathematical models provides an explicit account for the causal nature of human perception and performance. In particular, the notion of determinism versus free will is discussed in this context. The book is divided into four main parts, the first of which discusses the relationship between the concept of determinism and the fundamental laws of physics. The second part provides an introduction to using the self-organization approach from physics to understand human perception and performance, a strategy used throughout the remainder of the book to connect experimental findings and mathematical models. In turn, the third part of the book focuses on investigating performance guided by perception: climbing stairs and grasping tools are presented in detail. Perceptually relevant bifurcation parameters in the mathematical models are also identified, e.g. in the context of walk-to-run gait transitions. Chains of perceptions and actions together with their underlying mechanisms are then presented, and a number of experimental phenomena – such as selective attention, priming, child play, bistable perception, retrieval-induced forgetting, functional fixedness and memory effects exhibiting hysteresis with positive or negative sign – are discussed. Human judgment making, internal experiences such as dreaming and thinking, and Freud’s concept of consciousness are also addressed. The fourth and last part of the book explores several specific topics such as learning, social interactions between two people, life trajectories, and applications in clinical psychology. In particular, episodes of mania and depression under bipolar disorder, perception under schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive rituals are discussed. This book is intended for researchers and graduate students in psychology, physics, applied mathematics, kinesiology, and the sport sciences who want to learn about the foundations of the field. Written for a mixed audience, the experiments and concepts are presented using non-technical language throughout. In addition, each chapter includes more advanced sections for modelers in the fields of physics and applied mathematics.

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