Chapter 3 discusses how audiences interpret character motivations. The Iliad frequently draws attention to what drives characters, prompting ancient and modern audiences to reflect on motivations even when they are not explicitly mentioned. Many influential Homeric interpreters denied that characters had free will, and claim that a supposedly ‘complete and unambiguous’ heroic code dictated all their choices. The chapter argues that this view contradicts both the text’s mechanisms and ancient interpretive practices. It also briefly surveys modern literary theories on ‘mind-reading’ and their implications for interpreting literary texts, in order to establish a framework for analysing character psychology

Isaiah Berlin’s essay explores and criticises a conception of human freedom that identifies it with knowledge and, especially, with self-understanding. Even on this conception, freedom seems to require a power to change or reform one’s self – some power of self-determination through choice or decision, through will or volition. But this involvement of self-determination through the will then raises the issue of determinism. Are our choices or decisions antecedently determined? Knowledge and freedom may both be goods, but they are importantly distinct goods, and they may be in tension. Berlin’s reflections on freedom and knowledge are part of a wider project of understanding conceptions such as freedom in terms of their intellectual history and of exploring plurality within goodness and tensions between its various forms. The discussion will explore the relation between two very different forms of freedom – freedom as a form of power, a capacity to produce or prevent outcomes, and freedom as liberation, a desirable condition of fulfilment. It is freedom conceived as a power that seems threatened by determinism.

This chapter considers a number of aspects of Berlin’s celebrated essay ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’. These include a consideration of the origins and evolution of Berlin’s famous essay; the connections between the metaphor derived from an ancient Greek poet and his more philosophically explicit visions of monism and pluralism; Tolstoy’s conflictual view of history and Berlin’s assessment of both; and finally, Tolstoy’s identity as a child of the Enlightenment and his accompanying inability to accept the foxy nature of historical contingency (even if his artistic talent expressed this peerlessly) but also his failure to discuss man’s inhumanity to man, namely evil, in the profound way we might expect of such a major writer as him.

Berlin sees the history of philosophy as a history not just of the struggle to find answers to certain questions, but (because of the distinctive nature of these questions) to find the right means of framing them in the first place, as well as of determining the answers’ viability. He concentrates on how Enlightenment philosophers, thrilled by the success of science, sought to apply scientific procedures to ‘all that related to the social life of men’, and he focusses on the variously implemented theory of ‘ideas’, in which ‘the mind was treated as if it were a box containing mental equivalents of the Newtonian particles’. This chapter will argue that the Enlightenment philosophers not only envisaged the mind as a container for ideas, but ideas themselves as containers of ‘ideas’ in the other sense. Hume especially seems to assume that we can use empirical observation (by means of ‘the inner eye’) to discover how the mind functions – that we introspect the idea-particles moved by a Newton-like force of attraction while simultaneously observing the sensory impressions and concepts that they represent.

Isaiah Berlin argues that philosophy has a distinctive task, one which cannot be appropriated by the natural sciences. One of the reasons Berlin gives for holding that philosophy’s task falls outside the scope of science is that its area of reflection essentially employs normative concepts. An understanding of the human agent must, in the end, encompass an understanding, not only of meaning and intentional action but of the moral, political and aesthetic life of fully acculturated human beings. Although Berlin’s historical approach to this task was highly distinctive, his aims and his convictions concerning the relation between philosophy and science, the central place of the human agent in philosophy, and his anti-reductive, anti-positivist approach were shared with a number of his Oxford contemporaries, in particular G. E. M. Anscombe and P. F. Strawson. In this chapter, I look at how these three philosophers understand the nature of philosophy and the relation between philosophy and science, focusing particularly on their attitude to the topic of determinism.

This chapter revisits Sadr’s production from the mid-1970s until his execution in 1980, analyzing two overlooked texts – Manabi‘ al-Qudra fi al-Dawla al-Islamiyya and Al-Madrasa al-Qur’aniyya – that challenge portrayals of Sadr as an unequivocal supporter of Khomeini and Wilayat al-Faqih. These writings reflect Sadr’s engagement with Arab Leftist thought and Marxist determinism, as well as his commitment to developing a political theology centered on human agency. In contrast to Khomeini’s model of absolute clerical guardianship, Sadr advanced a participatory theory of Islamic government. His writings articulated the cultural and civilizational aims of Islamic governance. Notably, Sadralso staged a rare intervention on veiling and gender norms, marking a striking but forgotten episode. The chapter situates Sadr’s thought within ideological currents of the 1970s, including intra-Shi‘i debates in Iraq, the emergence of the Islamic Left, and evolving conceptions of turath (heritage). It argues that Sadr’s vision represented a distinctive alternative to both leftist models and clerical authoritarianism: a Shi‘i Islamic framework for cultural renewal, moral agency, and constitutionalism. By theorizing an Islamic notion of free will and social contract, Sadr carved out a critical space within post-1967 Arab political thought – one that remains vital to rethinking modern Islamic political thought.

Chapter 7 unpacks the forces sustaining societal inertia and explores pathways for transformative change. It introduces the metaphor of the “invisible strangling hand” to describe how systemic structures—emerging from policies, market dynamics, and social norms—trap societies in unsustainable behaviors. The chapter challenges the myth of free will and individual consumer responsibility, arguing that behaviors are deeply shaped by incentives, narratives, and institutional feedbacks. Central to this trap is the role of powerful vested interest parties (VIPs) in shaping perceptions through media, marketing, and policy influence, often masking harmful practices with greenwashing and moral licensing. Counterforces, such as scientists, activists, and journalists (SAWs), seek to challenge these narratives and highlight systemic dysfunctions. The chapter stresses the importance of collective worldview shifts, noting that transformative tipping points often begin at the network’s fringes. Historical examples and cognitive psychology reveal how moral dissonance, groupthink, and self-justification mechanisms sustain harmful norms.

This chapter traces notions of the self in the plays of early modern Spain. Drawing on a vast corpus of unpublished plays with the technique of “distant reading”, it examines the relation between self and free will in a period of increasing authoritarian control by both church and state. These plays demonstrate a deep preoccupation with maintaining a sense of personal freedom and choice despite the pressure of external constraints: Kallendorf proposes that the self is conceived as a “fortress” within which some sense of personal autonomy can be retained. This is very different from the more free-form relational concepts of the self that we have seen developed in the volume up to this point: the self remains grounded in the body and operative in society, but society places the body under heavy restraint.

philosophy of neuroscience, experimental philosophy, philosophy of action, free will, libertarianism, agent-causation, wild coincidence objection, statistical laws, probabilistic models, stochastic models, plasticity

It has been argued that our scientific discoveries support at least one of two distinct forms of causal reduction thereby making the notion that we irreducible agents obsolete. One is the reduction of the manifestation of causal dispositions to stimulated responses. The other is the reduction of kinds of causes of physical change to those studied in the hard sciences. In this chapter, I argue that neither have any scientific support. Rather, whether either form of reduction is viable won’t ultimately be resolved by scientific advancement but by analytic progress. Furthermore, I argue that attempts at the first are misguided as attempts at reducing what is a process (i.e., the manifestation of a causal disposition) to what can be a result of various processes (i.e., a stimulated response); while attempts at the second ultimately involve not fully taking into account how the specificity of any domain of science limits the generalizability of what can be discovered through it.

Here, I develop an incompatibilist argument according to which accomplishing many of the aims we intend to, and think we do, entails that we settle matters that aren’t already settled. Thus, if we actually accomplish these aims, determinism is false.

Here, I provide a summary of the notion of our agency for which I argue throughout this book, and how it resolves several longstanding problems within the philosophical literature on free will; namely – the “basic argument” and the “luck problem.”

The best models for certain neural matters underlying the expression of our agency are stochastic or probabilistic. While this fact has been thought to be consistent with the notion that we are irreducible agents who settle matters that aren’t already settled, this consistency has come under dispute. It has been argued that, given probabilistic models apply to the underlying neural matters, for the way we express the ability to settle matters that aren’t already settled to perfectly align with what should be expected would, over the long run, amount to a wild coincidence. I argue that this objection is an empirical objection that goes against empirical findings. Thus, it isn’t credible. Moreover, what we continue to observe through neuroscience is evocative of the idea that we are irreducible agents who do this sort of settling in the midst of disposing and inclining factors.

There has been an enduring debate as to whether psychological and neuroscientific findings bring the conventional idea that we are intentional agents into question. I argue that certain assumptions about intentional behavior which underly this debate are problematic. From observations made in Chapter 1, I make the case for a longstanding dispositional alternative, which I argue is more ecologically valid and consistent with neo-behavioral and cognitive psychological observations. According to this alternative, intending to behave is a way of being disposed to behave, and all sorts of other dispositions or inclining factors – cognitive and/or behavioral, psychological and/or neural – may be operative which either facilitate, or impede, forming and/or manifesting an intention. The upshot is that, not only is it unclear how neuroscientific observations might provide evidence against the conventional notion that we are intentional agents, this notion is consistent with and brings together both experimental findings and ancient insights.

Consistent with and extending from observations made in the previous chapters, I show that there is a fundamental problem with attempts at reducing ourselves, as settlers of matters that aren’t already settled, to mental states and/or events and offer an explanation as to why.

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.