The Nature Of Freedom

The book begins with familiar designs found all around and inside us (such as the ‘trees’ of river basins, human lungs, blood and city traffic). It then shows how all flow systems are driven by power from natural engines everywhere, and how they are endlessly shaped because of freedom. Finally, Professor Bejan explains how people, like everything else that moves on earth, are driven by power derived from our “engines” that consume fuel and food, and that our movement dissipates the power completely and changes constantly for greater access, economies of scale, efficiency, innovation and life. Written for wide audiences of all ages, including readers interested in science, patterns in nature, similarity and non-uniformity, history and the future, and those just interested in having fun with ideas, the book shows how many “design change” concepts acquire a solid scientific footing and how they exist with the evolution of nature, society, technology and science.

This volume, the first part of Paul Ricoeur's Philosophy of the Will, is an eidetics, carried out within carefully imposed phenomenological brackets. It seeks to deal with the essential structure of man's being in the world, and so it suspends the distorting dimensions of existence, the bondage of passion, and the vision of innocence, to which Ricoeur returns in his later writings. The result is a conception of man as an incarnate Cogito, which can make the polar unity of subject and object intelligible and provide a basic continuity for the various aspects of inquiry into man's being-in-the-world.

The governing theme of this volume is the role of systematicity in Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy. Kant's System of Nature and Freedom will be essential for anyone working on the history of modern philosophy and related areas of ethics, philosophy of science, and metaphysics.

New essays offer an overview of current research into Leibniz' metaphysics, situating this distinctive philosophy of nature.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Paul Ricoeur’s first book, Freedom and Nature, introduces many themes that resurface in various ways throughout his later work, but its significance has been mostly overlooked in the field of Ricoeur studies. Gathering together an international group of scholars, A Companion to Freedom and Nature is the first book-length study to focus exclusively on Freedom and Nature. It helps readers to understand this complex work by providing careful textual analysis of specific arguments in the book and by situating them in relation to Ricoeur’s early influences, including Merleau-Ponty, Nabert, and Ravaisson. But most importantly, this book demonstrates that Freedom and Nature remains a compelling and vital resource for readers today, precisely because it resonates with recent developments in the areas of embodied cognition, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of the will. Freedom and Nature is fundamentally a book about embodiment, and it situates the human body at the crossroads of activity and passivity, motivation and causation, the voluntary and the involuntary. This conception of the body informs Ricoeur’s unique treatment of topics such as effort, habit, and attention that are of much interest to scholars today. Together the chapters of this book provide a renewed appreciation of this important and innovative work.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1962.