Rejection Of Determinism Research Articles

Causality and determination revisited

It seems to be a platitude that there must be a close connection between causality and the laws of nature: the laws somehow cover in general what happens in each specific case of causation. But so-called singularists disagree, and it is often thought that the locus classicus for that kind of dissent is Anscombe's famous Causality & Determination. Moreover, it is often thought that Anscombe's rejection of determinism is premised on singularism. In this paper, I show that this is a mistake: Anscombe is not a singularist, but in fact only objects to a very specific, Humean understanding of the generality of laws of nature and their importance to causality. I argue that Anscombe provides us with the contours of a radically different understanding of the generality of the laws, which I suggest can be fruitfully developed in terms of recently popular dispositional accounts. And as I will show, it is this account of laws of nature (and not singularism) that allows for the possibility of indeterminism.

Shamed Women in the Novels of Juan Valera: Enslaved to the Other

JUAN Valera is a nineteenth-century Spanish novelist known for his unique style, sometimes called internal realism, which focuses on characters' complex psychological states and does not fit nicely into the popular literary movements of his time--romanticism, realism and naturalism. Part of what separates Valera from these movements is his treatment of desire and rejection of determinism. Desire is the motivating force behind action in Valera's novels, but it does not emanate spontaneously from his characters; their desire is profoundly imitative. This mimesis traps some characters in a downward spiral to catastrophe, yet others thrive. This study analyzes the aspirations and outcomes of the three female protagonists in Juanita la Larga, Dona Luz and Genio y figura. All three are illegitimate children and thus feel burdened with a sense of social shame throughout their lives. As adults they are obsessed with their social standing and reputations. Their sense of identity is wholly dependent on an Other, which inspires in them coquettishness, vanity, and a profound ambivalence of behavior toward other characters and groups: feelings of love mixed with hate, attraction with repulsion, and admiration with resentment. In searching for a frame of reference that would help me understand this ambivalence, I found Rene Girard's theories of human behavior, especially his theory of mimetic desire, to be immensely helpful. Girard explains that human desire always depends on someone else and is intrinsically ambivalent because the subject both admires the mediator of her desire (the model) and at the same time could resent her as a rival. Though Valera obviously could not be acquainted with Girard's theories, the mimetic quality of human desire is an ever-present force in his novels, for good and for bad. The strikingly different outcomes of the three characters at hand here are testament to the fact that Valera, while intuiting that human desire is necessarily mimetic, also believed in a person's free will to choose her model, and thus in the ability to avoid the negative effects of misguided desire. Juanita la Larga takes place in a fictitious Andalusian town called Villalegre. It narrates the love story of don Paco, a widowed man in his fifties who enjoys a prominent social position in town, and Juanita, a striking seventeen-year-old girl whose mother is Juana, a woman of humble origins renowned with Villalegre's elite class because of her work ethic and manual skills. As its very name denotes, Villalegre is in many respects an idyllic place. Surrounded by a beautiful and tranquil landscape, this small community appears to be enclosed in an atmosfera arcadica (Caudet 16). Yet behind this idyllic facade, Villalegre is also a very traditional, hierarchical and closed community controlled by a small secular and religious oligarchy: the cacique Andres Rubio; his right hand man don Paco; Paco's daughter Ines, who attained her status by marrying a wealthy landowner; and Father Anselmo. The rest of the community lives as subdued, devoted followers of the elite group's will (Juanita 74). Of course, for this rigid hierarchical order to exist peacefully, its members must respect the social structure that it imposes on them. Any transgression could jeopardize the harmony of the community, in fact its very foundation, and so must be swiftly punished. In Villalegre and communities like it, people live in a perpetual state of anxiety, obsessed by and ever vigilant of what others are saying, doing, and thinking. The narrator comically explains that in Villalegre ...apenas habia persona ... que pudiera hacer o decir cosa alguna que no se supiese. Hasta los mismos pensamientos se adivinaban alli, se divulgaban y se comentaban, como el pensador no pensase con mucho disimulo y muy para adentro (91). The townspeople are so obsessed by the Other that existentially they are unable to chart their own courses in life; they simply borrow, or mimic, the desires of others. …

Existentialist critiques of Cartesianism

This book is a discussion of Heidegger's, Sartre's and Marcel's rejection of Cartesian epistemology, the scepticism to which it leads and its objectivist conception of human existence. It compares this rejection with Wittgenstein's rejection of these conceptions of man, his relation to the knowledge of what belongs to the world in which he lives. It concentrates on the existentialist critiques of consciousness as a substance and of the self as such a substance, of each person's body as something external to which he is causally related, and of others as at best indirectly accessible to us. It discusses Sartre's positive views on these questions and the way he falls into a form of solipsism himself. It then considers Sartre's rejection of determinism and his conception of freedom as our capacity for choice. In a concluding chapter the book sketches a non-objectivist account of the self, its development, its 'bad faith', its capacity to emerge from it, and its knowledge of itself, free from the objections considered earlier. It then considers some new objections directed at its own account. Contents: Man in the World; Man's Way of Being: Existential Dualism; The Personal Dimension: Emotions and Value Judgements; Sartre and our Identity as Individuals; Mind and Body: Rejection of Cartesian Dualism; Sartre on the Self and the Other: Rejection of Cartesian Solipsism; Human Separateness and the Possibility of Communion: Marcel's Rejection of Sartrean Solipsism; Sartre: Freedom as Something to which Man is Condemned; Self, Self-Knowledge and Self-Change: A Non-Objectivist View and its Defense.

Woodrow Wilson's "Road Away From Revolution"

Now the rallying cry of resurgent democratic movements throughout the Soviet Empire, the riggt of national self-determination was first articulated in Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points and the League of Nations Covenant. Wilson's goals in defining the concept were to rejuvenate Western capitalism and liberalism, in order to ensure both justice and economic progress; and to offer a viable ideological alternative to revolutionary Russia. Wilson's policies sprang from a rejection of determinism; his views of Christian principles; and his admiration for the reforms of English Methodism. Through the concept of self-determination, Wilson brought a concern for social justice into the management of the international state system.

The Creativity Question

*Preface Introduction: The Creativity Question 1. Seminal Accounts Introduction Inspiration / Plato Creation as Making / Aristotle Genius Gives the Rules / Immanuel Kant Genius As Inherited / Francis Galton Creative Writers and Daydreaming / Sigmund Freud 2. Descriptive Accounts Introduction Creation as Craft / Edgar Allan Poe Fancy and Imagination / Samuel Taylor Coleridge The Role of Hunches in Scientific Thought / Walter Bradford Cannon Stages in the Creative Process / Graham Wallas Creative Thought in Artists / Catherine Patrick Genius and Insanity / Cesare Lombroso Creativity in Self-Actualizing People / Abraham H. Maslow 3. Explanations 1: Forms and Scope Introduction The Teleology of the Creative Act / Brand Blanshard Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry / Jacques Maritain Biosociation in Creation / Arthur Koestler Life and Creation / Otto Rank On the Relation of Analytic Psychology to Poetic Art / Carl G. Jung Unconscious Processes in the Artist / Harry B. Lee On Preconscious Mental Processes / Ernst Kris Creation and Neurosis / Lawrence S.Kubie Unconscious Scanning and Dedifferentiation in Artistic Perception / Anton Ehrenzweig Perceptual Modes and Creation / Ernest G. Schachtel Concern for Discovery in the Creative Process / Jacob W. Getzels and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Psychology Approaches to Creativity in Science / Anne Roe Architects, Personality Types, and Creativity / Donald W. MacKinnon The Psychology of Creativity / Frank Barron Creativity and Intelligence in Children / Michael A. Wallach and Nathan Kogan Education and Creativity / E. Paul Torrance The Associative Basis of the Creative Process / Sarnoff A. Mednick 4. Explanations 2: Special Trends Introduction Women and Creativity / Ravenna Helson Metaphor and Invention / William J. J. Gordon Creativity and the Bisected Brain / Joseph E. Bogen and Glenda M. Bogen Extrasensory Perception and Creativity / Stanley Krippner and Gardner Murphy A Behavioral Model of Creation / B. F. Skinner A Computer Model Approach to Creativity / Herbert F. Crovitz 5. Alternative Approaches Introduction A Rejection of Determinism / Charles Sanders Peirce Emergent Novelty / C. Lloyd Morgan Creation as Unpredictable / Henri Bergson Toward a Theory of Creativity / Carl R. Rogers On the Creation of Art / Monroe C. Beardsley The Process of Janusian Thinking in Creativity / Albert Rothenberg Intuition and Expression in Art / Benedetto Croce Consciousness and Attention in Art / R. G. Collingwood Creativity and Rationalism / Carl R. Hausman Selected Bibliography