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.

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.”

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.

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.

How were England’s wetland margins imagined at a new scale, as a site of reform and profit at the heart of a thriving polity? This chapter traces the iterative rewriting of wetlands in histories, geographies, agricultural books, and pro-drainage pamphlets at the turn of the seventeenth century. Driven by desires to unify England and amplify national wealth, these improving authors reconceived the meanings and management of wetlands and common lands. Scholars have often identified this period as a hinge between long-standing beliefs that topography and climate shaped human bodies and societies and a new conviction that soil, water, and air could and should be altered through human intervention. This chapter suggests that environmental determinism and environmental reform were not antithetical impulses but instead two sides of the same coin. Improving authors interlaced older humoral theories with new ideas about political economy to articulate fen futures. In recasting wetlands as unruly, unhealthy, and unproductive, ambitious wetland projects became a ‘cure’ for the nation’s most pressing maladies, promising to produce productive land and industrious subjects.

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 is the first ever English translation of Heisenberg’s unpublished response to the EPR paper. In this chapter, Heisenberg uses his famous cut argument to argue against the possibility of hidden variables.

This is a translation of the excerpts published in Naturwissenschaften of Grete Hermann’s 1935 essay on philosophy of quantum mechanics, recently translated into English. Her main thesis, in line with her natural-philosophical training and neo-Kantian commitments, is to argue that quantum mechanics does not refute the principle of causality. Quantum mechanics cannot be completed by, hidden variables, because it is already causally complete (albeit retroductively). In establishing this provocative thesis, she makes important use of Bohr’s principles of correspondence and complementarity and of Weizsäcker's version of the gamma-ray microscope, arguing that the lesson of quantum mechanics is the impossibility of an absolute description of nature independent of the context of observation.

This chapter surveys some of the ways in which the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics has led to a various views of the world with spiritual and moral implications; the perspective of this chapter is that most of these views are not demanded by the actual theory and experiments of quantum mechanics.