scholarly journals FATALISM: CONTRIBUTION OF WILLIAM OF OCKHAM

2021 ◽  
pp. 22-27
Author(s):  
B. SANJEEWA MAHESHE MENDIS
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
William Of Ockham ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Theological Fatalism

Fatalism is the ideology in which man is unable to do anything other than his own control and prevent any opinion, action or dislike. It also includes the fact that man is incapable of creating or preventing any event related to the future. There were several forms in fatalism. According to logical fatalism, such things are accepted as truth only if the future events of the present have already been decided. According to theological fatalism, free will does not mean that God has a foreknowledge of future events. Fatalism is one of the famous philosophical problems. Aristotle's interpretation of this has created a fatal mixture of theological teachings. This incompatible teaching was invented by Ockham. According to Aristotle, the omniscience and foreknowledge of God and the basic theological teachings have subtly challenged but some medieval philosophers have used those teachings without realizing it. As the first philosopher who criticized Aristotle in the Medieval Period, Ockham correctly interpreted the theological teachings. In contemporary philosophy, Ockham’s teachings are highly regarded. The purpose of this paper is to identify the confusions of Aristotle's teachings and to analyze Ockham’s interpretations. For this purpose, I have used the works of Aristotle and Ockham on fatalism as well as other sources which discuss and analyze the nature of logical fatalism as well as theology and how it affects theological teachings.

scholarly journals Francisco Suarez on God’s Knowledge of Future Contingent Events

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-151
Author(s):  
Ivan Vladimirovich Lupandin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Introductory Article ◽  
The World ◽  
Future Contingent ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Francisco Suarez

The problems of contingency, free will, omniscience and omnipotence of God, possible worlds, posed by the famous representative of the second scholasticism, the Spanish philosopher Francisco Suarez (1548–1617) in his work “On God’s knowledge of future contingent events” are discussed in the historical, philosophical and theological context. Suarez (unlike, for example, Spinoza) recognizes the existence of contingent events in the world, shows that the existence of contingent events does not diminish the omnipotence of God. Suarez, following Thomas Aquinas, shows how it is possible to reconcile the existence of free will, the main source of contingency, with the omniscience of God. As Luis Molina, Suarez recognizes God’s knowledge not only of real, but also of possible future. The originality of Suarez manifests itself in solving the question of how God knows possible future events and, accordingly, possible worlds. Attention is paid to the influence of Suarez’s philosophy on the philosophy of modern times, including Descartes and Leibniz. The reader is also offered a translation of the first chapter of the second part of the essay of the Spanish philosopher and theologian Francisco Suarez “On God’s knowledge of future contingent events”, in which Suarez on the basis of the hermeneutics of the Biblical texts proves the thesis about God’s knowledge of future contingent events, which could have happened, but in reality had not happened and will not happen in the future, disproving the arguments of Catholic theologians Ambrogio Catarino Politi (1484–1553) and Jansenius of Ghent (1510–1576), who questioned the assertion that God possesses such knowledge. The translation is provided with comments, an introductory article and a list of references.

scholarly journals Reconstruction of the Stagirite argument against the fatalism of future events

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-42
Author(s):  
Ruslan Myronenko
Keyword(s):  
Free Will ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Informal Logic ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
Logical Basis ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Theological Fatalism ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Over Time

The question of free will and determinism is one of the most discussed in analytic philosophy. This is because interdisciplinary research has entered the field of studying the brain and consciousness – and often, consciousness is presented as an invention, an epiphenomenon. One of the attributes of consciousness is free will. The prehistory of modern research in the field of free will is the discussion about the need for future events, which was first analyzed by Stagirite in chapter 9, "On Interpretation". Despite all the analyticity and consistency of Aristotle's works, this work is full of gaps in argumentation and formulations ambiguity. In this regard, over two thousand years, philosophers have described many reconstructions in this chapter's argumentation and interpretations. Conventionally, the question of fatalism can be divided into two intersecting directions: logical fatalism and theological fatalism. This article examines the first direction and will relate to the understanding of fatalism and arguments against it in the context of the development of logic and theory of argumentation in the 20th century. The first logician who radically revised the foundations of logic to build an argument against future events' fatalism was Jan Lukasiewicz. We can say that all his life Lukasiewicz fought against determinism and tried to find a logical basis for human freedom of will. However, the main discussion on this issue took place in the middle of the 20th century between the logicians whose work will be considered in this article: Linsky Leonard, Butler Ronald, Storrs McCall, and others. The discussion was conducted around understanding such philosophical concepts and their ontological status: time, truth, a necessity. Also, in the wake of Lukasiewicz, they clarified such logical concepts as bivalence and the law of the excluded third. Of particular interest was the emergence of logical modalities, true/false, which can change their meaning over time, which led to the emergence of new informal logic.

Mind and soul? Two notions in the light of contemporary philosophy

2021 ◽  
pp. 0957154X2110100
Author(s):  
Enrico Berti
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Moral Decision ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Moral Decision Making ◽  
History Of

From the perspective of the Aristotelian notion of ‘Form’, the author explores the history of the concepts of mind and soul focusing on their ontologized version, as entertained by conventional science. He concludes that current neuroscience lacks the conceptual wherewithal required to deal with the meaning of mind and soul and with agential consequences such as free will and moral decision making. [GEB]

scholarly journals A palace fit for the future: Desirability in temporal work

2021 ◽  
pp. 147612702110120
Author(s):  
Siavash Alimadadi ◽  
Andrew Davies ◽  
Fredrik Tell
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
The Past ◽  
Renewal Program ◽  
The Future ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Future Outcomes ◽  
Pluralistic Contexts

Research on the strategic organization of time often assumes that collective efforts are motivated by and oriented toward achieving desirable, although not necessarily well-defined, future states. In situations surrounded by uncertainty where work has to proceed urgently to avoid an impending disaster, however, temporal work is guided by engaging with both desirable and undesirable future outcomes. Drawing on a real-time, in-depth study of the inception of the Restoration and Renewal program of the Palace of Westminster, we investigate how organizational actors develop a strategy for an uncertain and highly contested future while safeguarding ongoing operations in the present and preserving the heritage of the past. Anticipation of undesirable future events played a crucial role in mobilizing collective efforts to move forward. We develop a model of future desirability in temporal work to identify how actors construct, link, and navigate interpretations of desirable and undesirable futures in their attempts to create a viable path of action. By conceptualizing temporal work based on the phenomenological quality of the future, we advance understanding of the strategic organization of time in pluralistic contexts characterized by uncertainty and urgency.

Church Time and Astrological Time in the Waning Middle Ages

2002 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 117-132
Author(s):  
Hilary M. Carey
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Missed Opportunities ◽  
The Past ◽  
Adam And Eve ◽  
Primary Qualities ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Scientific Claims ◽  
To Come

Time, according to medieval theologians and philosophers, was experienced in radically different ways by God and by his creation. Indeed, the obligation to dwell in time, and therefore to have no sure knowledge of what was to come, was seen as one of the primary qualities which marked the post-lapsarian state. When Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden of delights, they entered a world afflicted with the changing of the seasons, in which they were obliged to work and consume themselves with the needs of the present day and the still unknown dangers of the next. Medieval concerns about the use and abuse of time were not merely confined to anxiety about the present, or awareness of seized or missed opportunities in the past. The future was equally worrying, in particular the extent to which this part of time was set aside for God alone, or whether it was permissible to seek to know the future, either through revelation and prophecy, or through science. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the scientific claims of astrology to provide a means to explain the outcome of past and future events, circumventing God’s distant authority, became more and more insistent. This paper begins by examining one skirmish in this larger battle over the control of the future.

Time and Truth: The Presentism-Eternalism Debate

Philosophy ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Stoneham
Keyword(s):  
Open Future ◽  
Equal Footing ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Growing Block ◽  
The Open Future ◽  
Block Universe ◽  
The Way

AbstractThere are many questions we can ask about time, but perhaps the most fundamental is whether there are metaphysically interesting differences between past, present and future events. An eternalist believes in a block universe: past, present and future events are all on an equal footing. A gradualist believes in a growing block: he agrees with the eternalist about the past and the present but not about the future. A presentist believes that what is present has a special status. My first claim is that the familiar ways of articulating these views result in there being no substantive disagreement at all between the three parties. I then show that if we accept the controversial truthmaking principle, we can articulate a substantive disagreement. Finally, I apply this way of formulating the debate to related questions such as the open future and determinism, showing that these do not always line up in quite the way one would expect.

Building the Arrow of Time… Over Time: A Sequence of Brain Activity Mapping Imagined Events in Time and Space

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (10) ◽  
pp. 4398-4414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baptiste Gauthier ◽  
Karin Pestke ◽  
Virginie van Wassenhove
Keyword(s):  
Brain Activity ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Spatial Task ◽  
Brain Response ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Time Resolved ◽  
The Future ◽  
Spatial Dimensions ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Neural Signatures

Abstract When moving, the spatiotemporal unfolding of events is bound to our physical trajectory, and time and space become entangled in episodic memory. When imagining past or future events, or being in different geographical locations, the temporal and spatial dimensions of mental events can be independently accessed and manipulated. Using time-resolved neuroimaging, we characterized brain activity while participants ordered historical events from different mental perspectives in time (e.g., when imagining being 9 years in the future) or in space (e.g., when imagining being in Cayenne). We describe 2 neural signatures of temporal ordinality: an early brain response distinguishing whether participants were mentally in the past, the present or the future (self-projection in time), and a graded activity at event retrieval, indexing the mental distance between the representation of the self in time and the event. Neural signatures of ordinality and symbolic distances in time were distinct from those observed in the homologous spatial task: activity indicating spatial order and distances overlapped in latency in distinct brain regions. We interpret our findings as evidence that the conscious representation of time and space share algorithms (egocentric mapping, distance, and ordinality computations) but different implementations with a distinctive status for the psychological “time arrow.”

scholarly journals Cuing both positive and negative episodic foresight reduces delay discounting but does not affect risk-taking

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (8) ◽  
pp. 1998-2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Bulley ◽  
Beyon Miloyan ◽  
Gillian V Pepper ◽  
Matthew J Gullo ◽  
Julie D Henry ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Delay Discounting ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
Future Scenarios ◽  
Balloon Analogue Risk Task ◽  
Episodic Simulation ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Monetary Choice Questionnaire

Humans frequently create mental models of the future, allowing outcomes to be inferred in advance of their occurrence. Recent evidence suggests that imagining positive future events reduces delay discounting (the devaluation of reward with time until its receipt), while imagining negative future events may increase it. Here, using a sample of 297 participants, we experimentally assess the effects of cued episodic simulation of positive and negative future scenarios on decision-making in the context of both delay discounting (monetary choice questionnaire) and risk-taking (balloon-analogue risk task). Participants discounted the future less when cued to imagine positive and negative future scenarios than they did when cued to engage in control neutral imagery. There were no effects of experimental condition on risk-taking. Thus, although these results replicate previous findings suggesting episodic future simulation can reduce delay discounting, they indicate that this effect is not dependent on the valence of the thoughts, and does not generalise to all other forms of “impulsive” decision-making. We discuss various interpretations of these results, and suggest avenues for further research on the role of prospection in decision-making.

Perceived likelihood as a measure of optimism and pessimism: Support for the Future Events Scale.

2006 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron L. Wichman ◽  
Darcy A. Reich ◽  
Gifford Weary
Keyword(s):  
The Future ◽  
Future Events

Confessions

2018 ◽  
pp. 18-41
Author(s):  
Matthew D. O'Hara
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Religion And Spirituality ◽  
The Future

This chapter discusses the conceptual and practical tools of Catholicism that many colonial subjects used to shape their futures. Christianity came with a host of ideas and practices that influenced one's relationship to the future, even the future of eternity in the form of salvation or damnation. Introduced through European missionaries in the sixteenth century, such concepts as free will and sin demanded new ways not only of thinking about religion and spirituality but also of living and relating to time. The chapter draws on a rich body of scholarship related to these themes but also delves into a unique set of primary sources, especially the intriguing genre of confession manuals. When examined over the arc of the colonial period, these sources reveal an evolving sense of individual futuremaking through the tools of Catholicism.

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