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Historical determinism is the belief that events in history are entirely determined or constrained by various prior forces and, therefore, in a certain sense, inevitable. It is the philosophical view of determinism applied to the process or direction by which history unfolds. Historical determinism places the cause of the event behind it.
The problem of free will has been identified in ancient Greek philosophical literature. The notion of compatibilist free will has been attributed to both Aristotle (4th century BCE) and Epictetus (1st century CE): "it was the fact that nothing hindered us from doing or choosing something that made us have control over them".
The resulting philosophical debates, which involved the confluence of elements of Aristotelian Ethics with Stoic psychology, led in the 1st–3rd centuries CE in the works of Alexander of Aphrodisias to the first recorded Western debate over determinism and freedom, [50] an issue that is known in theology as the paradox of free will.
Necessitarianism is a metaphysical principle that denies all mere possibility; there is exactly one way for the world to be.. It is the strongest member of a family of principles, including hard determinism, each of which deny libertarian free will, reasoning that human actions are predetermined by external or internal antecedents.
Now, going back to the mentioned definition, chance means: that what cannot be predicted. If randomness affects a man (unsubjugated, reaching even the surface of his consciousness), then "unfree will" occurs. Thus, whenever we call something free, we feel something free, in short: wherever we feel our power, it is deterministic, it is a ...
Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are mutually compatible and that it is possible to believe in both without being logically inconsistent. [1] As Steven Weinberg puts it: "I would say that free will is nothing but our conscious experience of deciding what to do, which I know I am experiencing as I write this review, and this experience is not invalidated by the ...
Free will in antiquity is a philosophical and theological concept. Free will in antiquity was not discussed in the same terms as used in the modern free will debates, but historians of the problem have speculated who exactly was first to take positions as determinist, libertarian, and compatibilist in antiquity. [1]
Gradualism is often confused with the concept of phyletic gradualism. It is a term coined by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge to contrast with their model of punctuated equilibrium , which is gradualist itself, but argues that most evolution is marked by long periods of evolutionary stability (called stasis), which is punctuated by rare ...