Libertarianism (metaphysics) in the context of "Francisco Suárez"

Charlie Dunbar Broad FBA (30 December 1887 – 11 March 1971), usually cited as C. D. Broad, was an English philosopher who worked on epistemology, history of philosophy, philosophy of science, and ethics, as well as the philosophical aspects of psychical research. He was known for his thorough and dispassionate examinations of arguments in such works as Scientific Thought (1923), The Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925), and Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy (2 vols., 1933–1938).

Broad's essay on "Determinism, Indeterminism, and Libertarianism" in Ethics and the History of Philosophy (1952) introduced the philosophical terms occurrent causation and non-occurrent causation, which became the basis for the contemporary distinction between "agent-causal" and "event-causal" in debates on libertarian free will.

Indeterminism is the idea that events (or certain events, or events of certain types) are not caused, or are not caused deterministically.

It is the opposite of determinism and related to chance. It is highly relevant to the philosophical problem of free will, particularly in the form of metaphysical libertarianism. In science, most specifically quantum theory in physics, indeterminism is the belief that no event is certain and the entire outcome of anything is probabilistic. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the "Born rule", proposed by Max Born, are often starting points in support of the indeterministic nature of the universe. Indeterminism is also asserted by Sir Arthur Eddington, and Murray Gell-Mann. Indeterminism has been promoted by the French biologist Jacques Monod's essay "Chance and Necessity".The physicist-chemist Ilya Prigogine argued for indeterminism in complex systems.

Germain Gabriel Grisez (September 30, 1929 – February 1, 2018) was a French-American philosopher. Grisez's development of ideas from Thomas Aquinas has redirected Catholic thought and changed the way it has engaged with secular moral philosophy. In 'The First Principle of Practical Reason: A Commentary on the Summa Theologiae, I-II, Q. 94, A. 2' (1965), Grisez attacked the neo-scholastic interpretation of Aquinas as holding that moral norms are derived from methodologically antecedent knowledge of human nature. Grisez defended the idea of metaphysical free choice and proposed a natural law theory of practical reasoning and moral judgment which, although broadly Thomistic, departs from Aquinas on significant points.

Grisez was Professor of Christian Ethics at Mount St. Mary's University in Emmitsburg, MD from 1979 to his retirement in 2009.