The fin de siècle’s newly emerging scientific discourse of homosexuality was part and parcel of a broader tension between ‘materialists’ and ‘spiritualists.’ Whereas the former believed that human agency was fatally compromised by the determining influence of hardwired compulsions, the latter insisted on the existence of free will and man’s higher calling to resist basic impulses. For this reason, the notion of congenital homosexuality was an unacceptably radical one to the spiritualist faction of liberals and Catholics, which dominated among Belgian intellectuals and policymakers. Like those abroad, Belgian spiritualists associated the notion of inborn homosexuality with socialism in general and with the left-leaning French Third Republic in particular. This chapter zooms in on a series of international conferences to demonstrate how deeply interwoven the issue of homosexuality was with wider ideological tensions. It also shows why in Belgium the issue was sidelined so that its controversial nature would not stand in the way of penal reform.

This is the first of three chapters devoted to questions about human free will from a Jewish perspective. I identify three challenges to belief in free will: divine foreknowledge; divine control of history; and scientific determinism. The Bible ignores problems about free will that philosophers obsess over. This serves as a prelude to chapter 5, which examines a biblical episode that does engage one problem that analytic philosophers have addressed.

Takes up another aspect of free will, the challenge of scientific determinism. I argue that Jewish tradition contains surprisingly many thinkers who either deny free will or (more commonly) greatly limit its scope, question its value, or embrace compatibilism (the thesis that free will and determinism are compatible). Some of what these thinkers say can be transferred to the challenge of determinism as it exists today.

This chapter illustrates how a biblical text can bring certain philosophical problems to the fore, especially when attention is paid to its literary techniques. Such techniques are used in midrashic interpretations but have been put to extensive use by contemporary biblical scholars like Robert Alter. The story in Genesis of Joseph and his brothers provides a dramatic rendition of a philosophical problem: the seeming opposition between God’s control of history and human free will. I show how the problem is expressed through the narrative; discuss how a variety of midrashim and biblical exegeses address the problem; and relate the issue at hand to work by analytic philosophers such as Harry Frankfurt, Thomas Flint, and Peter Van Inwagen.

This chapter considers how, between the mid twelfth and the mid thirteenth century, the theme of free will was addressed according to two major lines of investigation: on the one hand, that of the relationship between free will and the different powers of the soul; and on the other hand, the idea that free will should be understood as a process divided into several steps.

In a 2002 paper, I offered a novel way of thinking about the compatibility of free will with determinism, one that depended on appealing to the typical understanding of time of the philosopher of physics as simply one of the four dimensions of the Block Universe, albeit an especially interesting and important one. I argued that rejecting the everyday notion of “passage of time,” and of the explanatory privilege that we usually give to past → future determination as opposed to future → past determination, allowed one to articulate a novel way of defending free action in a Block world subject to deterministic laws. The problem is, most of the time these days I no longer believe in the Block and do believe in the passage of time! But I still believe that human action is (often) free, and that physics poses no genuine threat to our freedom. In this paper I will explore how the core idea behind “Freedom from the Inside Out” can be modified to be compatible with a metaphysical picture in which time passes, and explanation is not fully time-symmetric.

This introduction establishes the overarching claim of this book: that Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists consistently focus on the disastrous consequences of willing and will-making, while simultaneously emphasizing the vital role that wills played in defining one’s sense of identity and self-worth. English Renaissance drama can be understood, in one way, to be preoccupied with considering the influence that wills exert over human life.

Here, I provide an overview of how both the faculty of the will and the last will and testament were conceived of in the period. The will was primarily thought to be an unruly part of the soul that hinders our ability to achieve what we desire, though the performance of the will was not merely localized to the body or psyche. One way of enacting one’s will upon the world was achieved for some through the production of a last will and testament. Last wills acted as tools for testators to impose their will upon the living, dictating who will, and who will not, benefit from their death. In their immaterial and material forms, wills shaped the quality and conditions of one’s life and afterlife.

Don Bartolomé de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, a Mexican diocesan priest of Spanish and noble Nahua ancestry, translated three plays from the Spanish baroque in the early 1640s. Due to his multiple positionalities – priest, translator, author – Alva has been understood as “in-between” distinct polarities. This understanding of Alva makes him relevant for examining sources and influences in proto-Latinx writing, including his way of dealing with language. This chapter analyzes Alva’s Nahuatl translation of Antonio Mira de Amescua’s El animal profeta y dichoso patricida, to argue that Alva is not “in-between” polarities, but rather is a cultural mediator that created and managed new contexts. Hence, Alva is a co-creator, not mere translator, who managed to reach two distinct audiences, Jesuit priest and Nahua elite, in one coherent text. He makes use of his positionalities, particularly in his portrayal of free will, strategically and intentionally to exercise his position of power as a priest and noble Nahua. Finally, his role as mediator contributes to the Latinx archive, providing an alternative to Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of “nepantla.” Instead, the process of “malinalli” in Aztec metaphysics becomes another way of conceptualizing a mixing together. This is exemplified in his process of translation.

Introduces the concept of mental capacity as a key meeting point between human freedom and mental disorder/disability. The emergence of a functional test of mental capacity, away from status and outcome tests, is discussed. An account is given of how the functional idea has been operationalised in mainly US–UK law and field tested in cases before a specialised court in England. This process is viewed as a classic one involving the public use of reason within a parliamentary democracy. Study of it has shown that an important romantic concern about the functional test (namely, that it overlooks the emotional or valuational aspects of human nature with an intellectual bias) are less compelling than was thought.

This chapter of the handbook introduces readers to the field of moral psychology as a whole and provides them with a guide to the volume. The authors delineate the landscape of morality in terms of five phenomena extensively studied by moral psychologists: moral behavior, moral judgments, moral sanctions, moral emotions, and moral communication, all against a background of moral standards. They then provide brief overviews of research on a few topics not assigned a dedicated chapter in the book (e.g., the moral psychology of artificial intelligence, free will, and moral responsibility), noting several other topics not treated in depth (e.g., the neuroscience of morality, links between moral and economic behavior, moral learning). In the last section of the chapter, the authors summarize each of the contributed chapters in the book.