Libertarian

The discovery of the motives behind human actions turned into a controversial issue among philosophers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While supporters of libertarianism maintained that human actions stemmed from an inner will, the Necessitarians, on the other hand, believed human actions were an effect of previous external causes. David Hume, however, came up with a middle-way solution for this dispute which he named his Reconciling Project. This comparative study aims to discover the concept of the Reconciling Project in the works of Alexander Pope. To achieve this the article would elaborate upon Hume’s thoughts on the theme mentioned above expressed in the eighth chapter of his book An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding entitled Of Liberty and Necessity. It would trace it to the works of Pope by analysing Pope’s views in Essay on Man and his notion of The Ruling Passion. It would be argued and concluded through a comparative method that Hume’s thoughts had found their way into the works of Pope, and both thinkers found human instincts as the real motive behind human actions. Through an intertextual analysis, it would also be concluded that this was either the direct effect of Hume's thoughts on Pope or that both figures were influenced by the same intellectual currents of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment, and secularisation.

“You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men!” (The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin) Contemporary discussions on freedom have recently drawn attention to the implications of the mind-body relation. Historically, the notion of freedom has centered on various naturalistic options, compatibilism, and weaker notions of libertarian freedom. This leaves strong agent-causal libertarianism as a minority position. Entering these discussions, we seek to establish the relation between a particular mind-body view and strong agent-causal libertarianism. We make two claims upon characterizing strong agent-causal libertarianism. First, we argue that strong agent-causal libertarianism requires some version of substance dualism (or immaterialist agency). Second, we argue that strong agent-causal libertarianism probably requires something like classical or Cartesian substance dualism. Drawing from the philosopher John Foster in The Immaterial Self, we show that the central defining feature of the sort of libertarian agency under investigation is ‘intrinsic autonomy’. While we recognize that Cartesianism is unpopular in contemporary discussions, we agree with Foster that it is probably what is entailed if we are going to ground something like a strong agent-causal libertarianism. The substance needed to explain this robust form of freedom begins to look like something not of this world and more like the substance described early on by Rene Descartes.