Date of Award

1924

Degree Type

Bachelors Essay

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Department

Philosophy

Abstract

The freedom of the will is one of the most important questions in philosophy. So much has been written on the subject that it hardly seems worth while to treat it in a thesis in which nothing can be said which has not already been said a number of times. The two opposing parties in the controversy have completed their respective cases; they have fully entrenched themselves behind volumes and volumes of weighty libraries and are now but waiting new recruits. As a matter of fact, though both sides of the debate seem to have exhausted their arguments, though they have used an misused logic and even created new logics for their purpose, yet neither have been able to convince the other. Today there are the two schools of thought as clearly distinct as there were fifty years ago and in the time of Luther. The arguments which we use today were known a thousand years ago. The only difference is that in one age a theological argument will be stressed. in another a scientific and in another a pragmatic. Different peoples dress the arguments in their favorite literary styles, but despite these quirks and furbelows which the discussion has now and then assumed, it has remained fundamentally on the same basis as ever. Perhaps in time to come experimental science will be able to dis­ close something more convincing concerning the human will, but we need not be too optimistic about that future. There is probably no phenomena of our interior life which is ore inaccessible than the will. However in this thesis we hope briefly to survey the present lay of the land. to clarify some of the fog obscuring the various issues, and in the mind of the writer, at any rate, to settle the question for once and always.

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Thesis for Degree of Bachelor of Arts from Marquette University

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