A dispute · spans 4 eras
Free Will vs. Determinism
Are we genuinely free, or is everything we do determined by prior causes?
The Stoics held that everything happens according to fate, and yet insisted on moral responsibility (we are still the kind of cause we are). Augustine wrestled with the same problem in Christian terms: how is human responsibility compatible with divine foreknowledge and grace? Spinoza was a hard determinist; Kant tried to rescue freedom by placing it in a noumenal self outside time; Sartre swung to the opposite extreme — radical freedom, condemned to be free. The dispute is unresolved and probably unresolvable.
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