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Can we will to believe what we choose? Are there times when we should at least try to believe in something? If it were easy to manipulate our own beliefs, low self-esteem would vanish, the divorce rate would decline, and over-consumption would ....

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... author who sees the relationship of willing to belief as an issue recurring thoughout the history of philosophy. In his book Religious Belief and the Will2, Louis Pojman identifies Soren Kierkegaard as a direct prescriptive volitionalist, i.e. a thinker who holds that beliefs can and ought to be (at least in some circumstances) directly willed. C. Stephen Evans, in "Does Kierkegaard Think Beliefs Can Be Directly Willed?"3 responds to Pojman's position, arguing that the attribution of direct volitionalism to Kierkegaard is too strong a claim. Evans does admit Kierkegaard as an indirect volitionalist, i.e. as holding that we can bri ...