What is the will? And what is its relation to human action? Throughout history, philosophers have been fascinated by the idea of 'the will': the source of the drive that motivates human beings to act. However, there has never been a clear consensus as to what the will is and how it relates to human action. Some philosophers have taken the will to be based firmly in reason and rational choice, and some have seen it as purely self-determined. Others have replaced the idea of the human will with a more general drive uniting ...
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What is the will? And what is its relation to human action? Throughout history, philosophers have been fascinated by the idea of 'the will': the source of the drive that motivates human beings to act. However, there has never been a clear consensus as to what the will is and how it relates to human action. Some philosophers have taken the will to be based firmly in reason and rational choice, and some have seen it as purely self-determined. Others have replaced the idea of the human will with a more general drive uniting humans and the rest of nature, living and non-living. This collection of nine specially commissioned papers trace the formulation and treatment of the problem of the will from ancient philosophy through the scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages, to modern philosophy, and right up to contemporary theories. Philosophers discussed include Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Hobbes, Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
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New. 041532467x. *** FREE UPGRADE to Courier/Priority Shipping Upon Request ***-*** IN STOCK AND IMMEDIATELY AVAILABLE FOR SHIPMENT-FLAWLESS COPY-AVAILABLE IMMEDIATELY, WHY WAIT? --232 pages; clean and crisp, tight and bright pages, with no writing or markings to the text. --TABLE OF CONTENTS: Introduction * 1 The concept of the will from Plato to Maximus the Confessor * 2 Aristotle, the Stoics and the will * 3 Intellect with a (divine) purpose: Augustine on the will * 4 The effect of the will on judgement: Thomas Aquinas on faith and prudence * 5 Moral psychology before 1277: the will, liberum arbitrium, and moral rectitude in Bonaventure * 6 Suarez, Hobbes and the scholastic tradition in action theory * 7 Kant on the will * 8 Nietzsche and Schopenhauer: is the will merely a word? * 9 Theories of the bodily will * Index. --DESCRIPTION: This collection of nine specially commissioned papers traces the formulation and treatment of the problem of the will from ancient philosophy, to modern philosophy and right up to contemporary theories. --EDITORS: Thomas Pink is Lecturer in Philosophy at King's College, London. He is the author of The Psychology of Freedom (1996), and the author of several articles in ethics and philosophy of action. M. W. F. Stone is Professor of Philosophy at Hogert Institut voor Wijsbegeerte, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at King's College, London. --* * FS REVIEW: The authors anthologized in the present volume suffer from a minor problem: None of them has any the least idea what the will is, or what are the fundamental theories of will advanced by the great philosophers from antiquity to the present day. This is in part due to the fact that they have never made a serious effort to understands the greatest philosophers who discuss the nature of the will, and in part to the fact that they have no knowledge of the psychiatric data amply available if only they had troubled to avail themselves of it. Hence we have discussions such as that by Janaway of Schopenhauer's theory of the will, in which we have the equivalent of a blind man directing traffic at one of the busiest intersections in mittown Manhattan during rush hour. All the author can do is quote from Schopenhauer and others without understanding a word of it. It is not surprising that he ends with the noncommittal statement, "Whatever coherence Schopenhauer's general theory of the will may have or lack...". We wait in vain for a determination of whether or not that theory is coherent. --with a bonus offer--