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Single Idea 5345

[filed under theme 16. Persons / F. Free Will / 5. Against Free Will ]

Full Idea

It is unimaginable to me that, despite the feeling that we control what we do, such a strong conception of ourselves as unmoved movers would have been added to our self-image unless we had first conceived of God along these lines.

Gist of Idea

We only think of ourselves as having free will because we first thought of God that way

Source

Owen Flanagan (The Problem of the Soul [2002], p.107)

Book Ref

Flanagan,Owen: 'The Problem of the Soul' [Basic Books 2003], p.107

A Reaction

I think this is right, though there are signs in fifth century Greece of contradictory evidence. The 'unmoved mover' seems unformulated before Plato's 'Laws' (idea 1423), but there is an implied belief in free will a hundred years earlier.

Related Idea

The 30 ideas from Owen Flanagan

5332 People believe they have free will that circumvents natural law, but only an incorporeal mind could do this [Flanagan]
5333 Philosophy needs wisdom about who we are, as well as how we ought to be [Flanagan]
5334 We resist science partly because it can't provide ethical wisdom [Flanagan]
5335 Emotions are usually very apt, rather than being non-rational and fickle [Flanagan]
5336 Ethics is the science of the conditions that lead to human flourishing [Flanagan]
5338 Normal free will claims control of what I do, but a stronger view claims control of thought and feeling [Flanagan]
5339 Cars and bodies obey principles of causation, without us knowing any 'strict laws' about them [Flanagan]
5340 Explanation does not entail prediction [Flanagan]
5341 Only you can have your subjective experiences because only you are hooked up to your nervous system [Flanagan]
5342 Physicalism doesn't deny that the essence of an experience is more than its neural realiser [Flanagan]
5343 People largely came to believe in dualism because it made human agents free [Flanagan]
5344 Free will is held to give us a whole list of desirable capacities for living [Flanagan]
5345 We only think of ourselves as having free will because we first thought of God that way [Flanagan]
5346 In the 17th century a collisionlike view of causation made mental causation implausible [Flanagan]
5347 Behaviourism notoriously has nothing to say about mental causation [Flanagan]
5348 Intellectualism admires the 'principled actor', non-intellectualism admires the 'good character' [Flanagan]
5349 For Buddhists a fixed self is a morally dangerous illusion [Flanagan]
5350 The Hindu doctrine of reincarnation only appeared in the eighth century CE [Flanagan]
5351 We only have a sense of our self as continuous, not as exactly the same [Flanagan]
5352 The idea of the soul gets some support from the scientific belief in essential 'natural kinds' [Flanagan]
5353 The self is an abstraction which magnifies important aspects of autobiography [Flanagan]
5354 We are not born with a self; we develop a self through living [Flanagan]
5355 Cognitivists think morals are discovered by reason [Flanagan]
21830 For Darwinians, altruism is either contracts or genetics [Flanagan]
21831 Alienation is not finding what one wants, or being unable to achieve it [Flanagan]
21832 Buddhists reject God and the self, and accept suffering as key, and liberation through wisdom [Flanagan]
21834 Sensations may be identical to brain events, but complex mental events don't seem to be [Flanagan]
21833 Research suggest that we overrate conscious experience [Flanagan]
21837 Morality is normative because it identifies best practices among the normal practices [Flanagan]
21835 We need Eudaimonics - the empirical study of how we should flourish [Flanagan]