Philosophy couldn’t even come up with its own definition for the thousands of years of its own existence and they school us what definition of free will is. Whom we can imagine when saying the word “philosophy”? For example Willard Van Orman Quine, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Bertrand Russell, and even Martin Heidegger.
Everything can be tagged as philosophy and I can assure you this discipline can be sometimes dishonest. Oxford Dictionary defines free will as “the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one’s own discretion”.
The philosophers were satisfyingly nodding. But what happened next? Science has started pushing out the notion that we possess free will. As we learn more and more about physics, neuroscience, genetics, and quantum physics the imagination of free will is disappearing.
And the utterly honest philosophers lowered their heads with humility and accepted the opinion – that we do have free will – as absurd.
No, I am just joking. They never acquiesced to it. Not only they are denying free will non-existence, but they have also changed the very definition.
It is not “the ability to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded” (this is Wikipedia’s definition), it is just the very ability to make decisions. And this is the free will.
But hell no. This is not free will in any possible manner. Not just they dodged the fact there is no free will they also made something utterly dishonest. They have changed the very definition. So now please let’s come up definition of philosophy itself and then go and try to school us.
I strongly propose this question belongs to common sense + critical thinking = science.
I should also admit the main proponent of free will is continental philosophy (even though some analytic philosophers also believe in it) and theology or philosophical theology.
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