β Scribed by Ryan D. Tweney
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
This paper argues a new interpretation of Jonathan Edwards's psychological account of human action. In Freedom of the Will (1754), Edwards adapted a sophisticated version of Newtonian determinism to the understanding of human thinking and action. Rejecting a mechanistic determinism, in which antecedent faculties "cause" actions, Edwards instead advocated a systemic view. Thus, rather than the "greatest apparent good" causing the "will," which in turn caused an action, Edwards claimed that "The will is as the greatest apparent good," thus grounding a systemic and dynamic account. Misunderstanding of his view has led to much confusion and a failure to properly locate Edwards within the history of American thought.
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
This volume is an edited transcription of a June 2001 Witness Seminar organized by the History of Twentieth Century Medicine Group of the Wellcome Trust Center for the History of Medicine at University College, London. Since 1993, Witness Seminars have brought together clinicians, scientists, and hi
This work is nothing less than a comprehensive reinterpretation of the transformation of higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Julie A. Reuben takes as her focus the fracturing of the nineteenth-century faith in the unity of truth by a series of developments that ult