This item has FREE SHIPPING to any address in NZ

NOTE: Item will ship from our Australian warehouse. A handling time of 2-4 business days applies for all orders. Delivery will then take 3-7 working days.

Laws, Mind, and Free Will

Condition: BRAND NEW ISBN: 9780262015257 Author(s): Steven W. Horst Format: Hardcover Year: 2011 Publisher: MIT Press (MA) Pages: 277 Age: 18 Series: Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology (Hardcover)

BUYER OFFERS: We are a retail store with set pricing and unfortunately we can't fulfil any requests to sell items for less than the listed price.

Description: In Laws, Mind, and Free Will, Steven Horst addresses the apparent dissonance between the picture of the natural world that arises from the sciences and our understanding of ourselves as agents who think and act. If the mind and the world are entirely governed by natural laws, there seems to be no room left for free will to operate. Moreover, although the laws of physical science are clear and verifiable, the sciences of the mind seem to yield only rough generalizations rather than universal laws of nature. Horst argues that these two familiar problems in philosophy—the apparent tension between free will and natural law and the absence of "strict" laws in the sciences of the mind—are artifacts of a particular philosophical thesis about the nature of laws: that laws make claims about how objects actually behave. Horst argues against this Empiricist orthodoxy and proposes an alternative account of laws—an account rooted in a cognitivist approach to philosophy of science. Horst argues that once we abandon the Empiricist misunderstandings of the nature of laws there is no contrast between "strict" laws and generalizations about the mind ("ceteris paribus" laws, laws hedged by the caveat "other things being equal"), and that a commitment to laws is compatible with a commitment to the existence of free will. Horst's alternative acc