But as spiritual persons they are eternal and not fully determinable by natural causes. Dostoevsky's sympathies lay on the spiritual side, and accordingly the major part of his philosophizing was devoted to defending such idealist theses as the immortality of the soul (which he considered the basic tenet of Christian belief) and the doctrine of free will (the philosophical thesis with which he is most closely identified). At least six separate arguments for life after death can be found in his writings, beginning in 1864 in a lengthy diary entry on the death of his first wife—a passage of utmost importance for his philosophical outlook (Scanlan 2002, pp. 19–37). The significance of free will as a defining trait of humanity is memorably portrayed in his most pointedly philosophical work—
Notes from Underground (1864)—in which he attacks the determinism of Nikolai Chernyshevsky and other Russian materialists, contending that human choices are radically unpredictable because people are capable of deliberately falsifying any prediction made. As Gary Saul Morson (1998) points out, the notion of an indeterminate future is central to Dostoevsky's narrative style as well as to his philosophical outlook.
The epistemological puzzle created by humanity's hybrid nature is how a spiritual soul mired in a material world, dependent on a physical brain and sensory apparatus, can fully understand either realm.
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