Freedom And Necessity

If you liked Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell-or Christopher Priest's The Prestige-or Iain Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost-here is a classic of magic-tinged adventure you may have missed.

Originally published in 1970, this book examines the origins of social organizations, the development of Robinson Crusoe economies and the conception of property or rightful ownership, as well as the origins of agriculture, race and class. Discussing commerce and the nation state, capitalist expansion and war between industrial power, the book is a concise yet comprehensive survey of the evolution of the structures of the world’s economies and of the ideas which underlie them.

This extended essay joins an old conversation at the intersection of freedom and necessity. Though it takes place at the beginning of the twenty-first century by the “Christian” reckoning that has become an integral part of European identity, it will at times read like a conversation between classical Greece and nineteenth-century Europe. The cast consists of characters drawn from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Plato as well as the authors themselves - Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, MacIntyre, and Nussbaum. Some of these writers have been associated with displaced, displacing claims of universality; but each is in place and in time in ways that are instructive for ethics. Myth, the matter of stories, becomes also the matter of critical reflection, which in turn is subjected to critical reflection. Every fragment of philosophy is a contribution to the reflection, and it is nothing if it is separated from the matter - the stories, the myths, and the characters (including us) who both make them and live in them.

Freedom and Necessity in Modern Trinitarian Theology examines the tension between God and the world through a constructive reading of the Trinitarian theologies and Christologies of Sergii Bulgakov (1871-1944), Karl Barth (1886-1968), and Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988). It focuses on what is called 'the problematic of divine freedom and necessity' and the response of the writers. 'Problematic' refers to God being simultaneously radically free and utterly bound to creation. God did not need to create and redeem the world in Christ. It is a contingent free gift. Yet, on the other side of a dialectic, he also has eternally determined himself to be God as Jesus Christ. He must create and redeem the world to be God as he has so determined. In this way the world is given a certain 'free necessity' by him because if there were no world then there would be no Christ. A spectrum of different concepts of freedom and necessity and a theological ideal of a balance between the same are outlined and then used to illumine the writers and to articulate a constructive response to the problematic. Brandon Gallaher shows that the classical Christian understanding of God having a non-necessary relationship to the world and divine freedom being a sheer assertion of God's will must be completely rethought. Gallaher proposes a Trinitarian, Christocentric, and cruciform vision of divine freedom. God is free as eternally self-giving, self-emptying and self-receiving love. The work concludes with a contemporary theology of divine freedom founded on divine election.

This book, first published in 1987, is about the classic free will problem, construed in terms of the implications of moral responsibility. The principal thesis is that the core issue is metaphysical: can scientific laws postulate objectively necessary connections between an action and its causal antecedents? The author concludes they cannot, and that, therefore, free will and determinism can be reconciled.