Free will and determinism - Philosophers (1)

Patricia Churchland (1943-)

Patricia ChurchlandChurchland is an American philosopher renowned for her study of the brain and its implications for philosophy of mind (sometimes referred to as 'neurophilosophy').

Karl Marx (1818-83)

Karl MarxMarx was author of The Communist Manifesto, and other famous works. He claimed in The German Ideology that the point of philosophy was not too interpret the world, but to change it.

Thomas Pink

Thomas PinkPink is a lecturer in philosophy at King's College, London.

" A decision is not any ordinary motivation. It is quite different from an ordinary desire... a decision aims at something, considers... principles and the chances of reaching that attainment."Pink (2004)

Gilbert Ryle (1900-76)

Gilbert RyleA very influential critic of Descartes, Ryle argued against the Cartesian view of mind as a separate substance, which he called 'the ghost in the machine'. Mental terms, instead, refer to how we behave.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80)

Jean-Paul SartreSartre was a French philosopher and novelist, and advocate of the philosophical tradition called existentialism. In Existentialism and Humanism he describes consciousness as not a thing and outside the causal order of the world. In his view, it was 'nothingness', the capacity to 'negate' any situation.

"Clearly freedom - our capability to control how we act - is a power of some kind. After all, freedom leaves how we act up to us. Freedom leaves, as one might put it, how we act 'within our power'. Our control of our actions is just that: an action- and event-determining power."Pink (2004)

"Men are not machines, not even ghost ridden machines... they are men."Ryle (1949, Ch3)

Churchland

Marx

Pink

Ryle

Sartre