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"Free will and determinism Fiction."
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Ed King : a novel
\"In 1962 Seattle, Walter Cousins, a mild-mannered actuary takes a risk of his own and makes the biggest error of his life: He sleeps with Diane Burroughs, the sexy, not-quite-legal British au pair who's taking care of his children for the summer. When Diane gets pregnant and leaves their baby on a doorstep, it sets in motion a tragedy of epic proportions. Their orphaned child, adopted by an adoring family and named Edward Aaron King, grows up to become a billionaire Internet tycoon and an international celebrity--the \"King of Search\"--who unknowingly, but inexorably, hurtles through life toward a fate he may have no way to determine. Sweeping, propulsive, and darkly humorous, Ed King reimagines one of the world's greatest tragedies--Oedipus Rex--for our own era, bringing contemporary urgency to a tale that still has the power to shock and inform.\"--cover p.4.
Book
The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien and Shahnameh by Firdausi: A Sadraic Interpretation of Free Will and Determinism
Fate, doom, and free will have always proved to be controversial terms among philosophers. The chief problem is whether a deterministic power prescribes the destiny of creatures or they possess pure free will in shaping their destinies. Mulla Sadra, a 17th century Iranian philosopher, believes in a blending of determinism and free will which he develops in the terms of Qaza and Qadar respectively. He introduces a model of fate through which determinism and free will equally participate. Using the human soul as a model, Mulla Sadra points out that people meet their fate through several factors, one of which is free will. However, he concludes that free will and deterministic factors altogether stand within the circle of an omnipotent being. This paper presents a comparative study of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion and Abul-Qasem Firdausi's Shahnameh. Both Indo-European mythologies are engaged with the clash of determinism and free will in the fabric of their plots. The authors of this paper argue that each mythology demonstrates a distinct system of free will/determinism dichotomy based on the yardstick of Mulla Sadra's theorem. To achieve this goal, the representative characters in both works are analyzed in the context of factors and actions the characters are involved with. The determinative factors, which define actions as free or deterministic, help bring a comparison between the systems of fate in the two works.
Journal Article
The Paradox of Choice in Interactive Fiction: A Critical Analysis of Bandersnatch's 'Choose-Your-Own-Adventure' Structure
This paper explores the emerging field of interactive fiction, with a special focus on the Netflix film Bandersnatch, and investigates whether interactive fiction truly empowers its audience to 'choose-their-own-adventure' through the use of free will or if it is simply a pre-scripted illusion. In particular, the paper explores the important role of artificial intelligence (AI) in interactive fiction, and how AI can be used to enhance the audience's experience of narrative agency and choice. The findings suggest that while interactive fiction offers a degree of choice and agency, the options presented to the audience are ultimately predetermined and limit the degree of free will available to the audience. However, the study also highlights the potential for AI to create more complex and dynamic narratives in interactive fiction that offer a greater degree of narrative agency and choice to the audience. The research contributes to a deeper understanding of the nature of narrative agency and the ways in which it is constructed in interactive fiction, as well as highlights the importance of balancing free will and pre-scripted elements in designing engaging and satisfying interactive fiction experiences. Keywords: Interactive fiction, Bandersnatch, artificial intelligence, free will, narrative structure
Journal Article
The coincidence makers
\"Tells the story of Guy, Emily, & Eric, whose job is creating coincidences and initiating various events in other people's lives ... They are responsible for organizing random encounters between lovers-to-be, creating moments of inspiration that help people make life changing decisions or 'building' coincidences that cause important scientific discoveries. But when Guy gets a new special mission, that mission, along with a mysterious killer who appears in town and other hidden forces that he is not aware of, are going to change everything\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
A Thomistic Account of Human Free Will and Divine Providence: Pedro de Ledesma and the De Auxiliis Controversy
Pedro de Ledesma is one of the Dominican theologians of the School of Salamanca involved in the De Auxiliis controversy, i.e., the disputes around a famous book by Luis de Molina on the relation between divine foreknowledge and providence and our free will. Studying an unpublished manuscript by Ledesma and his 1611 book on this subject, the article shows that he opposed Molina with a Thomistic position that we call deflationary. According to this interpretation, God, in moving the created will to do good actions, does not bring about an entity distinct from volition itself. Contrary to other Thomists, he does not think that the immediate effect of the divine motion of the will is an intermediary entity used by God to produce, with the will, the created free act. Ledesma defends his thesis by using some elements of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, in particular, a minimalist interpretation of the relation between action and passion already present in Domingo de Soto and the specific causality of immanent acts.
Journal Article
Reading Novel Experience, Sensational Fictions, and The Impressionable Reader in M. E. Braddon’s Joshua Haggard’s Daughter
Mary Elizabeth Braddon was on the frontlines of defense against the critics of the sensation novel, a genre she defended as both influential author and editor. This article argues that Braddon’s Joshua Haggard’s Daughter (1876), her final novel to appear in Belgravia under her editorship, actively challenges the criticism of the sensation genre. Braddon incorporates new elements to her defense of sensation fiction by engaging in the same cultural discourse used by the genre’s critics, the discourse of physiological psychology, and dramatizing multi-faceted models of novel-reader relationships. Braddon subverts audience and literary expectations by drawing on contemporary theories of reading and psychology to suggest positive benefits could be gained through novel reading and reversing the gender of the supposed impressionable reader. Joshua Haggard’s Daughter reveals the prevailing criticism of the sensation genre to be gendered, reductive, and ultimately nothing more than a sensational fiction itself.
Journal Article
Practical Gods: Carl Dennis’s Secularized Religious Visions
This paper examines Carl Dennis’s secularized religious visions in his Pulitzer-winning poetry collection, Practical Gods (2001). Dennis’s secularized religious visions can be quite understandable in the context of the ascending trends of secularization, diversification, and globalization of religion in America, and they demonstrate affinities with literary predecessors such as Wallace Stevens, with his aestheticized religion under the influence of Nietzsche, as well as with the innovative religious thinking of William Blake, Kazantzakis, and Oscar Wilde, and with certain aspects of Taoism and Zen Buddhism. This paper addresses Dennis’s perception of theological controversies, such as the contradiction between the omnipotence of God and the existence of evil, theological determinism vs. human free will, theological view of history vs. New Historicism, divinity in man, aestheticized religion, and earthly paradise through the focused lens of Dennis’s “practical religion”. Despite the breadth of the theses in Dennis’s conceived practical religion as examined in this paper, they are all tied up with the core of the phenomenological study of religion: that religion is important to believers of the religion irrespective of the objective truth of the religion or the actual existence of God. In Dennis’s views, as accorded with the phenomenological study of religions, God maybe an idea and a fiction, but it is a necessary fiction for humans. Thus, Dennis humanizes gods with the flaws and fragility of humanity while deifying ordinary humanity in the contemporary context. Contrasting what he views as theological determinism with its view of linear history and the apocalypse of grand events, Dennis embraces human free will, a non-teleological, aestheticized living with necessary fiction, and a transient paradise on earth. Carl Dennis’s religious vision reveals a poststructuralist (even though he did not brand himself so) abolition of the absoluteness of a transcendent signifier as well as binary opposition (between God and man, good and evil, religious/historical truth and fictionality), and it manifests an affinity with New Historicism and the phenomenological study of religion.
Journal Article
\Sua cuique persona?\ A Note on the Fiction of Legal Personhood and a Reflection on Interdisciplinary Consequences
The image of the mask is a well-known metaphor in law. It exemplifies the legal persona in that it both hides the private sphere and at the same time it enables participation in the public sphere by means of the legal personality of the rights-and-duties-bearing person that can effectuate legal standing. But legal personhood is itself a fiction, because it is a construction of law without which human beings would \"merely\" be individual persons. This fiction is most explicit in the artificial personality of corporations. Historically, the attribution of personhood by law shows that issues surrounding personhood, identity, and, or in relation to, the body often lead to normative and philosophical contestations. These are important to note in view of disciplinary cooperations of the \"Law and\" kind on the view that conceptual differences in cooperating fields lead to new Babels rather than interdisciplinary successes.
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