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He suggests free will is denied whether determinism is true or not. He says that if determinism is true, all actions are predicted and no one is assumed to be free; however, if determinism is false, all actions are presumed to be random and as such no one seems free because they have no part in controlling what happens.
Ontological reductionism: a belief that the whole of reality consists of a minimal number of parts. Methodological reductionism: the scientific attempt to provide an explanation in terms of ever-smaller entities. Theory reductionism: the suggestion that a newer theory does not replace or absorb an older one, but reduces it to more basic terms ...
Biological determinism, also known as genetic determinism, [1] is the belief that human behaviour is directly controlled by an individual's genes or some component of their physiology, generally at the expense of the role of the environment, whether in embryonic development or in learning. [2]
Bruce Waller (August 20, 1946 – February 8, 2023) was a contemporary American philosopher notable for his theories about the nature of free will and its implications for human society. [1] [2] He was a philosophy professor at Youngstown State University from 1990 until he retired in 2019. [1] [3] Waller died on February 8, 2023, at the age of ...
Genetic reductionism is the belief that understanding genes is sufficient to understand all aspects of human behavior. [1] It is a specific form of reductionism and of biological determinism , based on a perspective which defines genes as distinct units of information with consistent properties. [ 2 ]
Within the philosophy of science, emergentism is analyzed both as it contrasts with and parallels reductionism. [1] [2] This philosophical theory suggests that higher-level properties and phenomena arise from the interactions and organization of lower-level entities yet are not reducible to these simpler components. It emphasizes the idea that ...
Free will here is predominantly treated with respect to physical determinism in the strict sense of nomological determinism, although other forms of determinism are also relevant to free will. [30] For example, logical and theological determinism challenge metaphysical libertarianism with ideas of destiny and fate , and biological , cultural ...
The opposite of reductionism is holism, a word coined by Jan Smuts in Holism and Evolution, that understanding a system can be done only as a whole.One form of antireductionism (epistemological) holds that we simply are not capable of understanding systems at the level of their most basic constituents, and so the program of reductionism must fail.