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One of the main characteristics of the philosophy of Descartes which marked the starting point of modern philosophy and was continued by English empiricism and German Idealism is a special attention to the subject instead of cosmos, being or God. But what caused such a turn to subject? With a historical linguistic approach it can be shown that the replacement of old languages of philosophy namely Greek, Arabic and Latin language by modern European languages namely French, English and German can be one of the causes of that turn in the history of philosophy. It seems interesting that the change in modern European language occurred exactly at the same time the modern philosophy appeared. In this research we will concentrate on the word order and the possibility of the omission of the subject in the sentence. In modern European languages there is a insistence on the subject to appear at the beginning of the sentence. This can lead to a special attention to the subject in philosophical aspect. It may seem interesting that old languages of philosophy are null-subject languages in the sense that in these languages the subject can be omitted. In these languages the subject sometimes comes after the verb or even will not appear in the phrase. That may seem why in those languages a philosophy similar to modern philosophy did not appear. Finally it will be shown that the change in language did not confine to mere language and has important philosophical implications.

Human “free will” has been made problematic by several recent arguments against mental causation, the unity of the I or “self,” and the possibility that conscious decision-making could be temporally prior to action. This paper suggests a pathway through this thicket for free will or self-determination. Doing so requires an account of mind as an emergent process in the context of animal psychology and mental causation. Consciousness, a palpable but theoretically more obscure property of some minds, is likely to derive from complex animals’ real-time monitoring of internal state in relation to environment. Following Antonio Damasio, human mind appears to add to nonhuman “core consciousness” an additional narrative “self-consciousness.” The neurological argument against free will, most famously from Benjamin Libet, can be avoided as long as “free will” means, not an impossible event devoid of prior causation, but an occasional causal role played by narrative self-consciousness in behavioral determination. There is no necessary incompatibility between the scientific and evolutionary exploration of mind and consciousness and the uniquely self-determining capabilities of human mentality which are based on the former.