Comparing Baron D ' Holbach 's View On Determinism

In respect to the arguments of Ayer and Holbach, the dilemma of determinism and its compatibility with that of free will are found to be in question. Holbach makes a strong case for hard determinism in his System of Nature, in which he defines determinism to be a doctrine that everything and most importantly human actions are caused, and it follows that we are not free and therefore haven’t any moral responsibility in regard to our actions. For Ayer, a compatibilist believing that free will is compatible with determinism, it is the reconciliation and dissolution of the problem of determinism and moral responsibility with free willing that is argued. Ayer believes that

Many times I find myself sitting and wondering whether I am fully free or not. I wake up every single morning and do the same routine, which is eat breakfast, go to class or work, do homework, go to the gym, shower, and then go to bed. Does this truly mean I am free? There are a lot of questions that you can ask yourself while following a routine. Is this really the path I should have taken? Were my choices determined by external factors? Determinism is the thesis that an any instant there is only one physically possible future. Robert Blatchford and Walter Terence Stace, two philosophers, both agree that determinism is true, although they have two different views on whether this means that people are free or not. Blatchford believes that everything is predestined. Stace on the other hand, believes that a person chooses what they do because of free will. In this essay I am going to discuss both of the philosophers’ views more in depth and why I favor Stace’s view over Blatchford’s.

To establish determinism, we can admit by denoting that some events in our lives happen because of prior reasons without yet losing our sense of freedom. It is actually evident that the events and actions that an individual undertakes action have different effects upon him even though they may be past or present events. Though we might not be sure whether our past event result to our present status in life, it is pertinent to note that freedom in decision making is an open forum for each individual and impacts on later activities. We can admit that some events, for example, a next domino fall, are bound to happen because of a prior event. It is possible that if we have no power to act other than us, in fact, to act, then we have no free will. This argument for hard determinism is persuasive. It is certainly valid, and none of the premises appears to be clearly false. Although we have discovered a plausible argument in defense of hard determinism, most people find this argument to be impossible to accept. In our lives, we hold each other in account of our deeds that we had made wrong choices.

Baron d’Holbach was an author, philosopher, and encyclopedist who was a prominent character during the French Enlightenment and is notable for being the first writer of openly atheist works. He was an atheist, a determinist, and a mechanistic materialist, believing that all events are determined by mechanistic causes and that there is no God or spiritual existence, and that there is only physical matter that exists. “Of The System of Man’s Free Agency” is Chapter 11 from System of Nature, d’Holbach’s most famous work. In this chapter, d’Holbach argues against the existence of free will through an ideology of materialistic determinism, an ideology essential to all of his conclusions but with a fallacy of false cause, which therefore decomposes

Hard Determinism is a theory which basically states that we are have no free will whatsoever and so we cannot be morally responsible for our actions. This is because all actions are said to have a prior cause, and so do our own human actions. In addition to this, genetics and our social environment are said to have a huge influence on the way we respond I situations, meaning we can never truly act off of our own accord, there is always something influencing the way in which we behave. In this essay, I intend to prove whether or not Hard Determinism is right to say we are not truly responsible for our actions. To do this, I will compare Hard Determinism to other theories, including Libertarianism (which states we are entirely free and responsible for our actions) and Soft Determinism or Compatibilism (which states we are determined to an extent, yet

  In this essay, I intend to argue that a solution to this dilemma lies not in choosing free will over determinism, nor vice versa; but in the theory that determinism and free will are compatible – known as compatibilism.

For example, there are some philosophers who believe that our genes determine our future entirely, and some philosophers that believe our actions are dictated by environmental conditioning (Doyle 2001, p. 147). These two perspectives are both faulty and inaccurate. Our genes, however, are only hereditary units that determine the characteristics of our bodies. Although this may have some effect on the way we act, most of the information stored in the brain is accumulated throughout life. This does disqualify biological determinism alone as an explanation for our actions, although it can still be treated as a contributing factor in a more complete theory of determinism. For example, in a free will theory that uses O’Connor’s definition of free will, some biological genetic processes could explain our primal, animalistic desires, that cause us to act “out of character”. The behavioral (environmental) determinism perspective argues that the environment we are reared in has a massive effect on our perspective on reality; thus, it can be used to predict the decisions we will make in a given circumstance. This does not, however, prove that all of life is determined by causal chains, as is posited by determinists, it simply bolsters the idea that nurture plays a large role in developing our character. It provides no evidence to show that a certain childhood environment is somehow indicative of the likelihood of certain specific decisions in a certain situation. Adequate determinism, arguably the most rational of all deterministic schools of thought, is guided by statistical laws, and does not claim to be able to predict everything perfectly. It only claims to predict things that have been sufficiently experimented and explained by classical laws in the macroscopic world and, thus, does not claim to explain issues presented by QM that are contradictory to

The controversial metaphysical debate of free will in philosophy revolves around the blatant discordancy between casual determinism and society’s perception of free will. In Philosophy by Manuel Velasquez, he describes this debate as “a controversy that still rages in our society” (p. 202). The three foremost theories that are used in this deliberation are hard determinism, libertarianism, and compatibilism. Philosophers defend and believe in each one of these theories based upon their individual characteristics.

In order to determine whether man has free will, it is important to define the notion of free will. Free will, as defined by Kevin Timpe of the University of Tennessee at Martin, is the notion that person has the capacity to choose his or her course of action. In basic terms, free will is the belief that a person can make a choice without the choice being predetermined by a higher power. There is a serious debate as to whether man has free will or if life is predetermined with choices already made for a person. With such a contentious debate, there are various different beliefs on the existence of free will within philosophy. In this paper, I will examine thinkers of Philosophy as well as thinkers of the field of Jewish Philosophy. Philosophy

Spinoza: “The reason you believe you make your own decisions is merely because you are conscious of what you are doing and not aware of the causes that determined your actions.”

The debate of determinism and free will has gotten its root from the functioning of the brain. The determinism point of view has the ideology that the thought process and the working of the human body are based on a predetermined system which is guided by the brain. However, the free will proponents have the view that it is due to the free will of the human beings, which is developed as a result of observing the people around them and taking a decision on their own. They are of the view that different human beings, put in the same condition would not act same, however, following their free will, they would act in a different manner (Gazzaniga, 2012).

However, the question of whether human beings have free will has actually long been a controversial question even for some of the greatest thinkers in history, with answers made based on religious notions or scientific researches from philosophy to psychology. It is very difficult to have an ultimate answer to this question as the answer can be very different depends on one’s definition of “Free Will”. For this paper to remain focus on the scope of psychology, we shall define “Free Will” here as the ability to make choices free from constraints.

As much as people like to say that they do things such as homework out of their own discretion, this may be far from the truth. In philosophy and science, the well-established concepts of causality and determinism directly threaten the existence of free will in people. The main problem is that the general definition of free will is the capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from different options (O’Connor, 2016). This conflicts with the deterministic belief that all events are completely determined by previously existing causes which means that only one true outcome exists. In this essay, I will prove that Baron D’Holbach’s and Thomas Hobbes’s theories on causal determinism and materialism are valid, leading to the conclusion that free will does not exist. A prominent figure in the French enlightenment, Holbach was a western philosopher who was well known for his atheism and for his writing against religion, the System of Nature. Whereas Holbach was a French Philosopher, Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher. Hobbes is considered one of the founders of political philosophy and was best known for his book, Leviathan. He believed in materialism, which is a theory that asserts that

ABSTRACT: The concept presented in this report makes a summary of the author’s attempts to find a solution to the problem of compatibility of determinism and the freedom of human choice. This problem becomes apparently an isoluble paradox if one admits that the notion of freedom of human choice includes negation of the predetermination of decisions taken. Denial of such an "inclusion" is based on an analysis of the reasons that have led to the notion of freedom of human choice. Basically, this notion is intimately linked with the actual mechanism of decision-making. However, the concept of freedom of human choice is not identical to this mechanism and should be regarded as a

In the environment, determinism is defined by their environment and are conditioned to be the people they are. With this explanation, it depends on the life experiences an individual encounter that affects their behaviors. With the psychological development explanation, people are governed by psychological forces, many of them unconscious, that cause them to think, feel, and act in certain ways. With this explanation, the actions that humans perform are the result of psychological impulses that have been formed by people’s earliest relationships and experiences. With the social dynamics explanation, people are social creatures and are influenced by the people around them.