Reliance of Intuitions in Free Will Philosophy

Reliance of Intuitions in Free Will Philosophy Student’s Name: Instructor’s Name: Course Number: Date: Reliance of Intuitions in Free Will Philosophy The term ‘free will’ has been in existence in the philosophical world for over two millennia. Free will is the ability of an individual to unimpededly choose between several different courses of action. This term is relative to numerous other terms related to decision-making such as notions of responsibility and guilt. An example of a decision made in free will is an individual deciding to jump from a distant location in to a pool full of water. Secondly, in philosophy, intuition is the ability to obtain or gain a particular kind of knowledge that cannot be obtained or acquired either by education or observation, inference or reference, experience or reason. For instance, the knowledge or mathematics can be acquired via education and other sources but the truth of certain scientific concepts such as axioms cannot be inferred or observed. The interconnection of free will and intuition depends on several other philosophical terms and explanations that are correctly examined in the article. Thereupon, this paper focuses on explaining the capacity and degree of the possibility that people can use and rely on intuitions when making decisions based on free will. Therefore, the accumulative literature review on the study of both articles proves my hypothesis that in a world full of notions of determinism and incompatibility, human beings can still rely on their own intuitions when making decisions. From my understanding of the content article, I refer to intuitions as certain states of mind that we find ourselves in when considering between many propositions. In these propositions, the decision that one might end up making will might have or might have not depended on the experience of the individual, particular inferences form their past studies or educational reference. Their decision would have been made in free will. Thereupon, having understood both terms, the question of the topic is whether it is efficient for a philosopher to rely on their intuitions when making decisions. In this context, I will use the philosopher’s intuition as ‘evidence’ of the result, or the decision. The answer to the question, as Shaw (1980) supports it, is that yes, intuitions can be used as evidence to the decision made if the credibility of the philosopher’s theories and knowledge on the subject matter is higher than the philosopher’s knowledge on the background of the subject and the decisions of his predecessors on the same subject matter. For example, if an individual wish to make a decision on whether or not to eat noodles for lunch, his or her own intuitions will aid him or her in making the decision and not the background of the meal or people’s reviews on the matter. Many philosophers, in the recent years, have denied that an individual can use intuitions to make a decision. These philosophers deny the idea because of numerous philosophical considerations that something psychological such as an intuition cannot help one make a philosophical decision. Also, Nichols (2011) states that these philosophers, through their knowledge of experimental philosophy, state that one of the mai...