According to Robert Kane...

According to Robert Kane, the first person who used the term ‘hard determinism’ and ‘soft determinism’ was William James (James, 1956), who lived at the beginning of the twentieth century. (2002, p. 22) Western compatibilists who espouse the belief that causal necessity is compatible with freewill, hold an identical view to the Muslim philosophers. This view particularly explained and extended in the teachings of Mulla Sadra, the founder of modern Islamic philosophy.

But the difference is that Mulla Sadra has veraciously attempted to distinguish between determinism and necessity. He believes that freedom does not negate the causal necessity but rather negates determinism, and the causal necessity of free actor entails the necessity of the effect, but not its determinism. However this does not imply that it would be the determinist object.

As has been elaborated on in the previous chapter, Mulla Sadra believed that the non-distinction between the two concepts, i.e. determinism and necessity as well as the mixture of the two concepts of freedom and contingency provide the main reasons for the adoption of the incompatibility between causal necessity and freedom. He emphasised that one should distinguish technically between determinism and necessity in one hand, and freedom and contingency in the other hand.

According to Robert Kane, one of the main and most important disagreements regarding freedom within Western philosophical thought is the disagreement between the compatibilisists and the incompatibilisists (Ibid). We can summarise the main contemporary Western philosophical schools regarding freedom and causal necessity as follows: Libertarianism: A tendency that believed not in determinism and causal necessity, and adopted incompatibility between freedom and determinism.

This group are subsumed under the category of the incompatibilists. Compatible determinism: Also known as soft determinism. Incompatible determinism: Also known as hard determinism We will now briefly elaborate on and criticise these three tendencies comparing them with the mentioned comments of Muslim thinkers on this subject. Libertarianism Incompatibilism Those who have adopted this theory have rejected determinism; they are indeterminists and believe that it contradicts human freewill, i.e.

incompatibilism. They believe that human beings are free from any form of determinism and causal necessity.