Concept

Free will

Overview

ability of agents to be the ultimate source or originator of their choices, free from external determination

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Free will is discussed.

Physical necessity is a heteronomy of the efficient causes, for every effect is possible only according to this law, that something else determines the efficient cause to exert its causality. What else then can freedom of the will be but autonomy, that is, the property of the will to be a law to itself? But the proposition: "The will is in every action a law to itself," only expresses the principle: "To act on no…
Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
Uses the term “free will” and “freedom of the will”. The author is linked to this idea in the knowledge graph.
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Therefore the necessity of the determination of the will by the motive, which is like that of the effect by the cause, can be exhibited perceptibly and directly only in the case of the brutes, because here the spectator has the motives just as directly before his eyes as their effect; while in the case of man the motives are almost always abstract ideas, which are not communicated to the spectator, and even for the…
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea
Uses the term “freedom of the will” and “necessity”. The author is linked to this idea in the knowledge graph.
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In setting forth the position reached in the controversy, he divides the writers into two parties. The one sort, he says, are content to say that the freedom of the will is exempt from outward constraint; and the other sort maintain that it is also exempt from inward necessity. But this exposition does not suffice, unless one distinguish the necessity that is absolute and contrary to morality from hypothetical…
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil
Uses the term “freedom of the will” and “necessity”. The author is linked to this idea in the knowledge graph.
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A will is purely animal (arbitrium brutum) when it is determined by sensuous impulses or instincts only, that is, when it is determined in a pathological manner. A will, which can be determined independently of sensuous impulses, consequently by motives presented by reason alone, is called a free will (arbitrium liberum); and everything which is connected with this free will, either as principle or consequence, is…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
Uses the term “free will”. The author is linked to this idea in the knowledge graph.
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Of Liberty And Necessity. § 1. The question, whether the law of causality applies in the same strict sense to human actions as to other phenomena, is the celebrated controversy concerning the freedom of the will; which, from at least as far back as the time of Pelagius, has divided both the philosophical and the religious world. The affirmative opinion is commonly called the doctrine of Necessity, as asserting human…
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive
Uses the term “freedom of the will” and “free-will”. The author is linked to this idea in the knowledge graph.
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Hence it is significantly said: "In the hand of his own counsel." But since the very act of free will is traced to God as to a cause, it necessarily follows that everything happening from the exercise of free will must be subject to divine providence. For human providence is included under the providence of God, as a particular under a universal cause.
Aquinas Thomas, Summa Theologica, Part I
Uses the term “free will” and “necessity”.
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It is in human consciousness,--differing from that of animals by not only containing perceptible representations but also abstract conceptions independent of time-distinctions, which act simultaneously and collaterally, whereby deliberation, _i.e._ a conflict of motives, becomes possible--it is in human consciousness, I say, that free-will (_arbitrium_) in its narrowest sense first makes its appearance; and this I…
Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in Nature
Uses the term “freedom of the will” and “free-will”. The author is linked to this idea in the knowledge graph.
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In a word, if it is agreed to call every act free which springs from the self and from the self alone, the act which bears the mark of our personality is truly free, for our self alone will lay claim to its paternity. It would thus be recognized that free will is a fact, if it were agreed to look for it in a certain characteristic of the decision which is taken, in the free act itself. But the determinist feeling…
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will
Uses the term “free will”.
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