This is the first ever English translation of Heisenberg’s unpublished response to the EPR paper. In this chapter, Heisenberg uses his famous cut argument to argue against the possibility of hidden variables.

This is a translation of the excerpts published in Naturwissenschaften of Grete Hermann’s 1935 essay on philosophy of quantum mechanics, recently translated into English. Her main thesis, in line with her natural-philosophical training and neo-Kantian commitments, is to argue that quantum mechanics does not refute the principle of causality. Quantum mechanics cannot be completed by, hidden variables, because it is already causally complete (albeit retroductively). In establishing this provocative thesis, she makes important use of Bohr’s principles of correspondence and complementarity and of Weizsäcker's version of the gamma-ray microscope, arguing that the lesson of quantum mechanics is the impossibility of an absolute description of nature independent of the context of observation.

This chapter surveys some of the ways in which the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics has led to a various views of the world with spiritual and moral implications; the perspective of this chapter is that most of these views are not demanded by the actual theory and experiments of quantum mechanics.

It may seem odd that Rudolf Carnap chose to include in his philosophy of science textbook a whole chapter on the problem of free will and determinism. The problem, or better a tangle of related problems, had exercised metaphysicians and ethicists for thousands of years. And by his own account Carnap engaged in neither metaphysics nor ethics and wanted to leave traditional philosophy behind him. So, on the face of it, the chapter presents us with a puzzle about Carnap as well as about free will and determinism. Rather than a full treatment of the traditional issues, the chapter was a response to a then recent paper by Hans Reichenbach that argued that the deterministic laws of classical physics preclude genuine choice as well as any meaningful freedom. Reichenbach goes on to argue that if, however, the fundamental laws are statistical as in quantum mechanics, both choice and freedom are restored. Carnap rejects both of Reichenbach’s conclusions and in the process addresses questions about how we are to understand laws of nature and causation as well as freedom and choice. This chapter examines and assesses Carnap’s arguments and asks whether they amount to a deviation from his anti-metaphysical stance.

In this chapter Innes explores how Soviet economics, and the neoclassical economics behind British neoliberalism, came to conceive of the political economy as a closed system, governed by predetermined economic laws and dependable behaviours. Both orthodoxies are shown to depend on arguments about the universal truths of the political economy that are not just utopian, but tautological - circular - in their reasoning. Their axiomatic assumptions and actions are valid, as distinct from true, by virtue only of their logical formulation, and their end goals are consequently as impossible to realise as they are to refute. By exploring the evolution of both Soviet and neoclassical economic thought, Innes outlines the affinities between the ‘social physics’ of neoclassical economics and the deterministic assumptions of Stalinist central planning, and explains why it is that even the relatively critical, ‘second best world’ neoclassical economics that became associated with New Labour policy is freighted with no less determinism than the ‘first best world’ assumptions adopted by the New, neoliberal right.

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