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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Freedom and Causality in Contemporary Islamic & Western Philosophy Part 3: Free Will and Causality in Contemporary Western Philosophy Philosophical theories in contemporary western thought can be categorised in three main currents: a.

Libertarianism , which is described as incompatibilism for its belief that the determination of causal laws negates the freewill meaning they are incompatible, and because the free will is a very obvious fact it cannot be overcome by determined causal laws.

There are many explanations of this type of thought in current western philosophy, but I have chosen three important theories that I believe they provide the best clarification and deduction, they are: • Agent causation or immanent causation that was suggested by Rodrick Chisholm. This theory can be compared to the theory of sovereignty of Al-Sadr in contemporary Islamic philosophy.

●Simple indeterminism that was suggested by Carl Ginet, which can be compared to the theory of Na’ini in Islamic contemporary thought. • Causal indeterminism, suggested by Robert Kane. It can also be compared to the mentioned theory of sovereignty. b. Hard Determinism, which agrees with libertarianism in the incompatibility of freewill with causal laws, but opposes it in freewill of agents.

Hard Determinism believes there is no chance of freewill of agents because all agents are governed by determined causal factors. Several thinkers and philosophers adapted this kind of explanation of relation between causal determined law and human will, among them Paul Edwards gave a very clear expression of this idea. c.

Soft Determinism , that disagrees with both libertarianism and Hard Determinism, and believes in compatibility of causal determined law and freewill and alleges that not only there are not any conflicts between causal law and freewill but rather freewill cannot be emerged without the comprehensive causal law.

Most philosophers in both Islamic philosophy and western philosophy inclined to this current of thoughts like Farabi, Avecina, Mulla Sadra, Tabatabai in Islamic Philosophy, and Thomas Habbes, David Hume, John Stuart Mail and A.J. Ayer in western philosophy. Here I chose the explanation of Ayer for its demonstrative clearness to show an example of this tendency of contemporary western philosophy.

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