Free Will

Freud, probably disingenuously, claimed until late in his life never to have read either of these philosophers. Schopenhauer’s pessimism and Nietzsche’s optimism were both well acquainted with the automatic stirrings of the mind, and Freud’s concept of the ‘Id’ (that instinctive self in which our primal processes are manifest) seems to be closely r

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Ultimately, we have no free will, because we aren’t outside the chain of cause and effect and randomness, as others have explained in more detail. But we do have something you might arguably call “proximate free will,” in that what I referred to as the “decision-making parts of our brains” are evolved psychological mechanisms that are like algorith... See more

The problem is that it has recently become fashionable to regard whatever we feel inside as the true voice of nature speaking. The only authority many people trust today is instinct. If something feels good, if it is natural and spontaneous, then it must be right. But when we follow the suggestions of genetic and social instructions without questio

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It seems most likely, as Josiah B. Gould concludes in his The Philosophy of Chrysippus, that this prominent Stoic held two incompatible views of fate and alternated between them to draw the benefits from each. The first view was that the ‘rigorous causal nexus’ of fate provides a logical basis for the magical prophecies of the revered Delphic Oracl

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