Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-2rsb6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-12T08:13:33.789Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Freedom and Personality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Extract

Is it possible to say anything on the well-worn theme of human freedom or unfreedom which has not been ahready better said by someone else before us? It may be doubted; yet it is always worth while to see whether we cannot at least set what is perhaps already familiar to us in a fresh light and so come to a clearer comprehension of our own meaning. This, at any rate, is all that will be attempted in these pages; I have spoken in an earlier essay of the “practical situation” in which we find ourselves whenever we have to make a decision as involving indetermination, and my purpose is simply to make it plainer to myself, and so incidentally perhaps to a reader, what I mean by such an expression. I shall start, then, by adopting what we may perhaps agree to call a phenomenological attitude to the subject; that is, I will try to describe the facts in a way which anyone who recalls occasions when he has been driven to take a decision will recognize as faithful to his experience, without imparting into the description any element of explanatory speculative hypothesis. The description is meant to be one which will be admitted to be true to the “appearances,” independently of any theory about the “freedom of the will”—to describe correctly that which it is the object of all such theories to explain.

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1939

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable