This chapter examines Foucault’s theory of self-cultivation and its influence in anthropology. It considers the criticisms of atomistic individualism and social determinism that are often levelled at practices of self-cultivation and argues that practices of self-cultivation are neither wholly self-directed nor wholly socially determined. Ethnographies of self-cultivation reveal the efforts that people make to shape themselves and the worlds in which they find themselves. How far such efforts go, the form that they take, and the relationships in which they are embedded will be specific to particular lives, but focussing on practices of self-cultivation enables anthropology to account for the reflective efforts that people make to live well. Resisting interpretations of self-cultivation as entirely self-directed or socially determined collapses a second dichotomy prevalent in the literature, between those practices of self-cultivation found in ‘pedagogic’ ethical projects and those found in ordinary life. This chapter makes the argument that forms of reflective self-cultivation are found in the ‘midst’ of everyday practice to varying degrees, and in contexts of intense ethical training people remain vulnerable to moral plurality and the contingency of messy everyday life.

Several central themes of Schelling’s celebrated 1809 Freedom Essay were constructed in direct response to Jacobi. This chapter touches on two themes in which Schelling opposes Jacobi, and in doing so pushes Schelling’s thinking on human freedom into entirely fresh terrain: the first theme is Jacobi’s concept of reason, and the second is Jacobi’s understanding of pantheism as logically entailing determinism.

The Introduction to this book establishes Faulkner’s interest in writing materials as both a theme in his work and in his own writing and publishing career. Faulkner began his career not as a fiction writer but as a poet and illustrator, making his own handmade books, some for sale and others for friends and love interests. He maintained this attention throughout his life to the physical forms taken by his books. The Introduction sets forth the stakes of the book as a whole. Over and against a persistent technological determinism in cultural and media studies, William Faulkner and the Materials of Writing shows how Faulkner can help us think through the way in which media can only be understood in the context of its use. The telegraph, for example, works no faster than the mail if a telegram is not delivered to the intended recipient or otherwise goes unread. The Introduction also introduces three broad sets of concerns that will be central in the chapters that follow: The relationship of the individual to media forms; the connections of media with race, gender, and intimacy; and an understanding of writing as both text and thing in the world.

Wallace’s reputation as an author naturally outstrips his renown as a philosopher, but Wallace himself wrote that he saw philosophy and fiction as different arms of a single gesture. Among the strains of philosophy with which he dealt directly was determinism. Indeed, his undergraduate philosophy thesis on this subject was published as a stand-alone text in 2010, under the title Fate, Time and Language. This chapter introduces the concepts with which Wallace grapples in this work, as well as tracing the structural persistence of the theme of determinism through his writing. The chapter also argues that Wallace was an accomplished technical philosopher in his own right, but that the strict form of philosophical writing did not lend itself to his tendency toward literal illustrations of complex concepts. In this respect, the chapter argues for Wallace as a literary philosopher in the vein of Wallace Stevens, seeing the creative work as a form of philosophy in itself.

Chaos and complexity are related concepts that help explain patterns in nature, and the inherent limitations we face in trying to interpret them. This chapter is a relatively straightforward examination of these two fields, but it applies them specifically to the biological sciences, demonstrating the constraints on prediction and inference in biological systems, especially evolutionary systems, based on chaos theory. Complexity theory explains how nature can create complex functioning systems, whether they are anatomical or behavioral, and reveals how we can get something as complex as the eye, or consciousness, as an emergent property of a complex system following simple biological or physical rules. The ways in which emergent properties can be contrasted to engineered solutions are emphasized.

It is essential that we rethink psychology. The rethinking that has taken place in the past has resulted in the decline of some schools of thought, such as behaviorism, and the rise of others, such as cognitive psychology. However, past rethinking has not solved two major flaws in mainstream psychology: reductionism and the wrong-headed exclusive adherence to causal accounts of behavior. Reduuctionism has resulted in a focus on isolated individuals and increasingly isolated brains and brain parts. Instead, the perspective of 'society to cells' is advocated, giving priority to macro processes and context. Second, it is argued that psychological science must be concerned with both causally determined and normatively regulated behavior. Although some human behavior is causally determined, much of behavior is regulated by cultural beliefs about what is 'correct' for particular individuals in particular contexts. Such normatively regulated behavior involves some level of intentionality. Psychology as the science of causal and normative behavior moves from contexts to individuals, from societies to cells.

The limited nature of self-control gives rise to awkward questions. Are people who get into trouble due to poor self-control really to blame, or simply the innocent victims of circumstances beyond their control? This long and pivotal chapter addresses what the limited nature of self-control means for moral responsibility. On the one hand, poor self-control might at times be a valid excuse, but on the other, we would not want a world in which everyone can claim to be nothing but the innocent victims of their endowments from birth and their social background. These considerations lead straight to one of the most vexing problems in philosophy: How is moral responsibility possible in a universe in which everything is caused by what came before? My strategy for tackling this question is to introduce three distinct epistemological standpoints to look at the problem and to consult two bodies of knowledge: the vast literature on free will and the scholarship on folk intuitions regarding criminal sentencing. Together, these three standpoints and two bodies of knowledge furnish the building blocks for guidelines to decide on matters of poor self-control and moral responsibility.

Readers of American literature increasingly already know something about the career of Cherokee writer and editor John Rollin Ridge. In the preface to his 2018 breakout novel There There, Tommy Orange offers readers his version of Ridge’s claim to fame: “The first novel by a Native person, and the first novel written in California, was written in 1854, by a Cherokee guy named John Rollin Ridge.”1 The novel Orange references is Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit, a semifictional story of a Mexican war veteran driven to vengeance by the cruelty of white settlers. Although it did not sell well in Ridge’s lifetime, Penguin Random House’s new addition suggests that Ridge’s importance to college syllabi and American literary scholarship will only deepen in the years ahead. As Ridge’s biographer notes, while it failed to provide Ridge with the financial security he desired, the novel birthed a public interest in Joaquín Murieta’s story that has been with us ever since.2

Covers the last century of the school’s activity, including lesser-known figures such as Euphrates, Hierocles, Cleomedes, Philopator and Aurelius Heraclides, as well as Marcus Aurelius. Emphasizes the amount of activity in physics and logic as well as in ethics.

In his 1789 On Determinism and Moral Freedom, Snell treats the compatibility of determinism and morality. Drawing on Kant’s distinction between the empirical and intelligible character, Snell tackles the issue of how the determinism of the phenomenal world can be reconciled with freedom, specifically with respect to the capacity to do otherwise. Anticipating the contemporary charge that intelligible freedom understood as entailing the capacity to do otherwise would contradict the causal connection of appearances, Snell advances a Leibnizian interpretation of Kant’s account of free will and rejects the proposition that an indeterministic conception of the capacity to do otherwise is a necessary condition for moral imputation. He defines freedom principally as the absence of external constraint and argues that this in no way infringes upon the hypothetical necessity of occurrences in the world of sense. Furthermore, Snell maintains that the agent’s consciousness and inner feeling of self that his action is the expression of his own self-activity is all that is required for morality and moral imputation.

August Ludwig Christian Heydenreich’s On Freedom and Determinism and their Compatibility (1793) presents the central tensions between determinism and indeterminism prior to the Critical philosophy and outlines how the latter is able to resolve these tensions. He notes that for all that Kant’s conception of free will was able to accomplish, there is still considerable disagreement on how this conception is to be understood, particularly between Carl Christian Erhard Schmid and Karl Leonhard Reinhold. The originality of Heydenreich’s position consists in his assertion that the moral power of choice cannot belong to the sphere of nature or to the supersensible world. If it belonged to the former, then its actions would necessarily be determined in accordance with the law of causality. If it belonged to the latter, then its actions would necessarily be determined by the moral law and culpability for immoral actions would be abolished. Instead, the moral power of choice must be situated between the two realms and constitute the boundary and bridge between them.

In On the Grounds and Laws of Free Actions (1795), F.C. Forberg responds at length to Leonhard Creuzer’s skeptical concerns with Kant’s account of free will. Forberg observes that theoretical reason demands that the activity of free will be conceived of as determined by a sufficient ground in accordance with a law. By contrast, practical reason demands that we presuppose that freedom pertain to both moral and immoral action. Whereas Creuzer is skeptical that these demands can be reconciled, Forberg argues that their compatibility is secured by the Critical philosophy. Forberg maintains that the principle of sufficient reason threatens freedom only if the relation between ground and what is grounded is temporal. However, if the principles which ground actions are intelligible and therefore atemporally related to actions, then the ground itself can be conceived of as within the subject’s control. Moreover, whereas laws of nature command natural powers on the condition of a temporally preceding cause, unconditional laws of intelligible powers are not bound by this condition. Thus, there is no demonstrable contradiction in positing that an intelligible power could be subject to an unconditional law and nevertheless possess freedom to act in conformity with or contrary to that law.

In his Skeptical Reflections on Freedom of the Will with Respect to the Most Recent Theories of the Same (1793), Leonhard Creuzer avows his skepticism with respect to freedom of the will. His skepticism applies equally to our moral psychology and to proper philosophical treatments of free will. According to Creuzer, philosophy has fared no better than common sense in adjudicating the dispute on free will. He discusses the purported inadequacy of pre-Critical treatments of free will by thinkers such as Crusius, Leibniz, and Spinoza, and maintains that the Critical philosophy has not succeeded in resolving this perennial dilemma but has merely determined the problem more precisely.

In his treatises De divinatione and De fato, Cicero discusses the possibility of the prediction of future events. His understanding of divination in these philosophical works differs significantly from accepted Roman practice. Thus, De divinatione should not be read as a handbook on Roman divination. Rather, it should be read alongside De fato as an exhortation to act in the service of the res publica after the death of Caesar. Rather than denying outright that divination is real, Cicero seeks to refute the more superstitious divinatory practices current in Rome, all of which he attaches to the individual rather than to the political community to which he has dedicated his life. Among these superstitious views are the belief that humanity is subject to impersonal fate and therefore that human responsibility is curtailed. In writing for a Roman audience, Cicero denies both the notion that men cannot be responsible for their own actions, thus rejecting the idea of fate, as well as the existence of divination in the context of a deterministic worldview.

Ethics, for Spinoza, is knowledge of “the right way of living.” That ethics is central to his philosophical project is unmistakable from the title of his most systematic presentation of his philosophy: Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata). While that work seeks to demonstrate a broad range of metaphysical, theological, epistemological, and psychological doctrines, they are selected for inclusion, at least in large measure, because of the support he takes them to provide for his ultimate ethical conclusions. Many of those conclusions are distinctive and provocative, and many of his reasons for them are innovative and intriguing. This chapter begins by providing an outline of Spinoza’s ethical theory, including is naturalistic foundations; its primary terms of ethical evaluation; the nature and causes of bondage to the passions; the prescriptions of reason; the way to freedom and autonomy; and eternity, intellectual love of God, and blessedness. It then considers four important questions for Spinoza’s ethical theory: the nature and motivational force of ethical judgments; the conditions for ethical responsibility; the role of altruism in ethics; and the value of life and the harmfulness of death.

MIT professor Edward Lorenz made a serendipitous discovery about weather in the early 1960s, using a digital computer. He found that a small error in the initial conditions for a weather forecast could grow exponentially into a large error within days. This came to be known as the Butterfly Effect, one of the founding principles of chaos theory. To obtain initial conditions for weather forecasts, data from hundreds of weather balloons launched daily around the world are combined with satellite data through a procedure called data assimilation. The Butterfly Effect limits the useful period of weather prediction to about two weeks in advance. Carrying out an ensemble of weather forecasts, starting from different initial conditions, allows probabilistic predictions that extend beyond this limit. The philosophical concept of determinism is introduced, as is the concept of Laplace’s Demon, motivating the notion of a Climate Demon that predicts climate perfectly.