These and other questions emphasize the fact that chance and choice are two leading actors on stage whenever issues of determinism are under discussion. ...

The 13 contributions of this collective offer new and challenging ways of reading well-known and more neglected texts on akrasia (lack of control, or weakness ...

Philosophers, and other thinking people, have long pondered three grand questions about the nature of reality and our status and significance within it.

To be autonomous is to be a law to oneself; autonomous agents are self-governing agents. Most of us want to be autonomous because we want to be accountable for what we do, and because it seems that if we are not the ones calling the shots, then we cannot be accountable. More importantly, perhaps, the value of autonomy is tied to the value of self-integration. We don't want to be alien to, or at war with, ourselves; and it seems that (...) when our intentions are not under our own control, we suffer from self-alienation. What conditions must be satisfied in order to ensure that we govern ourselves when we act? Philosophers have offered a wide range of competing answers to this question. (shrink)

1. For many thinkers in the seventeenth century, self-determination is the mark of free agency: a free agent is one who determines himself, and conversely. To determine oneself, in this context, is to be the cause of one’s own actions, and that in two ways. A self-determiner brings it about, first, that he does something, as opposed to not acting at all. And second, he brings it about that the action he performs is of some specific kind, as opposed to (...) being an action of some other kind.1 Not to be self-determined, then, with respect to a particular action, is for that action to be caused (if caused at all) by something other than the agent himself. This other thing may be altogether distinct from the agent: another person or some external impersonal factor. Or it may be something that is within the agent in some way but is distinguishable from himself - that is, from his real or true self. An action whose cause is a thing or person other than the agent who performs it is said to be determined by that thing or person, and the latter is said to determine it. Correspondingly, when an agent himself is the cause of an action, he is said to determine that action, and the action is said to be determined by him. Thus the term “determine” is used in such wise that free agents can be said to determine their own actions as well as their own selves. Indeed, when an agent is said to determine himself, what is usually meant is that he determines himself to act or to act in such and such way. 2. The terms “determine” and “determination” had other uses in seventeenth-century philosophical writing. Sometimes to determine something was to decide or settle it; to ascertain or establish it; to direct or regulate it; or to fix, delimit, or define it. But the causal use that I have just characterized is the one that most pertains to the concept of self-determination and thence to that of free agency. (shrink)

In contemporary philosophy, the will is often regarded as a sheer philosophical fiction. In Will as Commitment and Resolve , Davenport argues not only that the will is the central power of human agency that makes decisions and forms intentions but also that it includes the capacity to generate new motivation different in structure from prepurposive desires. The concept of "projective motivation" is the central innovation in Davenport's existential account of the everyday notion of striving will. Beginning with the contrast (...) between "eastern" and "western" attitudes toward assertive willing, Davenport traces the lineage of the idea of projective motivation from NeoPlatonic and Christian conceptions of divine motivation to Scotus, Kant, Marx, Arendt, and Levinas. Rich with historical detail, this book includes an extended examination of Platonic and Aristotelian eudaimonist theories of human motivation. Drawing on contemporary critiques of egoism, Davenport argues that happiness is primarily a byproduct of activities and pursuits aimed at other agent-transcending goods for their own sake. In particular, the motives involved in virtue and in its practice as understood by Alasdair MacIntyre are projective rather than eudaimonist. This theory is supported by analyses of radical evil, accounts of intrinsic motivation in existential psychology, and contemporary theories of identity-forming commitment in analytic moral psychology. Following Viktor Frankl, Joseph Raz, and others, Davenport argues that Harry Frankfurt's conception of caring requires objective values worth caring about, which serve as rational grounds for projecting new final ends. The argument concludes with a taxonomy of values or goods, devotion to which can make life meaningful for us. (shrink)

(H1) ‘Free action’ is subject to the causal theory of reference and thus that (H2) The essential nature of free actions can be discovered only by empirical investigation, not by conceptual analysis. Heller’s proposal, if true, would have significant philosophical implications. Consider the enduring issue we will call the Compatibility Issue (hereafter CI): whether the thesis of determinism is logically compatible with the claim that..

A DISSERTA TION CONCERNING LIBERTY and NECESSITY; CONTAINING REMARKS VN THE ESSAYS of Dr. SAMUEL WEST, WRITINGS OF SEVERAL OTHER AUTHORS, ON THOSE SUBJECTS. ...

The unfolding of the task -- Freedom, pantheism, and idealism -- The account of the possibility of evil -- The account of the actuality of freedom -- The description of the manifestation of evil in man -- God as moral beingthe nature of the whole with respect to freedom -- Indifference and the birth of love.

In this paper we reconsider the issue of free choice and the role of the whmorphology employed in it. We show that the property of being an interrogative whword alone is not sufficient for free choice, and that semantic and sometimes even morphological definiteness is a pre-requisite for some free choice items (FCIs) in certain languages, e.g. in Greek and Mandarin Chinese. We propose a theory that explains the polarity behaviour of FCIs cross-linguistically, and allows indefinite (Giannakidou 2001) as well (...) as definite-like FCIs. The difference is manifested as a lexical distinction in English between any (indefinite) and wh-ever (definite); in Greek it appears as a choice between a FCI nominal modifier (taking an NP argument), which illustrates the indefinite option, and a FC free relative illustrating the definite one. We provide a compositional analysis of Greek FCIs in both incarnations, and derive in a parallel manner the Chinese FCIs. Here the definite.. (shrink)

Cases involving certain kinds of manipulation seem to challenge compatibilism about responsibility-grounding free will. To deal with such cases many compatibilists give what has become known as a ‘soft line’ reply. In this paper I present a challenge to the soft line reply. I argue that any relevant case involving manipulation—and to which a compatibilist might wish to give a soft line reply—can be transformed into one supporting a degree of moral responsibility through the addition of libertarian elements (such as (...) alternative possibilities of a kind unavailable under determinism and executive control of the sort commonly associated with agent-causation). From a compatibilist’s perspective the subtraction of libertarian elements should make no difference to any assessment of the agent’s responsibility. The compatibilist should therefore judge the agent morally responsible after the removal of the libertarian elements. Yet removal of the libertarian elements returns the case to its original form and thus what started out as a soft line has now collapsed into a hard line reply. Various ways of resisting my argument are considered, but each is shown to carry important burdens. (shrink)

When you are making up your mind, deciding what to do, you have the idea that you are free in what you are doing. It is hard to shake. You are going to do the one thing, but you can certainly do the other. That is what you think. Rational deliberators, as they can be called, have an inescapable sense of freedom. Dana Nelkin, in the following clear-headed paper, asks if this sense of freedom establishes that determinism is not true. (...) Read on for her answer. She also has things to say about another understanding of the claim that we know we are free when we are making up our minds. Whether or not you agree, you will learn things. Prof. Nelkin is at the University of California at San Diego. (shrink)

It used to be widely held by philosophers that God and evil are incompatible.1 Not any longer. Alvin Plantinga's Free Will Defense is largely responsible for this shift. Indeed, Robert Adams avers that "it is fair to say that Plantinga has solved this problem. That is, he has argued convincingly for the consistency of [God and evil]."2 And William Alston writes that "Plantinga...has established the possibility that God could not actualize a world containing free creatures that always do the right (...) thing."3 You might expect praise like this from Christian philosophers. You might not expect it from William Rowe, one of the foremost atheistic philosophers of our day, but this is precisely what we find. Rowe writes. (shrink)

In this splendid section from his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding , Hume's first concern is our ordinary belief that the natural world -- the world leaving our own conscious existence aside -- is a world of determinism, all cause and effect. He gives his account of what this ordinary belief can come to, the fact of the matter. Turning to our own conscious existence, he finds the same fact of the matter. Hence our world too is a world of determinism, (...) all cause and effect. That is the story with the man who comes to dinner and does not rob Hume of his silver standish. The story of Indeterminism, and in particular of the kind of freedom that is origination, must be a mistake. (shrink)

Michelle Kosch examines the conceptions of free will and the foundations of ethics in the work of Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard. She seeks to understand the history of German idealism better by looking at it through the lens of these issues, and to understand Kierkegaard better by placing his thought in this context. Kosch argues for a new interpretation of Kierkegaard's theory of agency, that Schelling was a major influence and Kant a major target of criticism, and that both the (...) theory and the criticisms are highly relevant to contemporary debates. (shrink)

, LI, . D., F. B. A. Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Aberdeen LONDON QEO IGE ALLEN AND IJNWIN LTD PREFACE JOHN LAIRD did not live to ...

It might be the case that absence of constraint is the relevant sense of ' freedom' when we are discussing the freedom of the will, but it needs arguing for. ...

Negative freedom (as opposed to positive freedom) has been widely considered an inherently non problematic notion. This paper attempts to show that, if considered as a good with a minimally objective structure, negative freedom can disrupt the capacity for deliberating in a substantively (that is, non purely formal, decision-theoretic) rational way. The argument turns on the notion of non-satiation, as a property of the objective value of some goods of not changing when the availability of the good is increased. Two (...) classes of non-satiating goods are distinguished, one of which has disruptive consequences for rational deliberation. Negative freedom belongs to this last class; and its non-satiating conceptual nature is defended by means of a simple dispositional analysis of value. It is suggested that also rationality itself can be regarded as a non-satiating good that can disrupt deliberation. (shrink)

Kadri Vihvelin has recently argued that between compatibilists and incompatibilists, the incompatibilists have a greater dialectical burden than compatibilists. According to her, both must show that free will is possible, but beyond this the incompatibilists must also show that no deterministic worlds are free will worlds. Thus, according to Vihvelin, so long as it is established that free will is possible, all the compatibilist must do is show that the incompatibilists' arguments are ineffective. I resist Vihvelin's assessment of the dialectical (...) burdens of compatibilists and incompatibilists, as well as her assessment of the best arguments for incompatibilism. (shrink)

Wegner’s argument on the illusory nature of conscious will, as developed in The Illusion of Conscious Will ( 2002 ) and other publications, has had major impact. Based on empirical data, he develops a theory of apparent mental causation in order to explain the occurrence of the illusion of conscious will. Part of the evidence for his argument is derived from a specific interpretation of the phenomenon of auditory verbal hallucinations as they may occur in schizophrenia. The aim of this (...) paper is to evaluate the validity of the evidence on auditory verbal hallucinations as employed by Wegner. I conclude that auditory hallucinations do not provide solid evidence for Wegner’s theory. Moreover, the phenomena in schizophrenia provide, in fact, an argument against part of Wegner’s theory of apparent mental causation. (shrink)

In a number of recent papers, Michael Bratman has defended a policy-based theory of identification which represents the most sophisticated and compelling development of a broadly hierarchical approach to the problems about identification which Harry Frankfurt drew our attention to over thirty years ago. Here I first summarize the bare essentials of Bratman's view, and then raise doubts about both its necessity and sufficiency. Finally I consider his objections to rival value-based models, and find those objections to be less compelling (...) than he makes them out to be. (shrink)

_The opening paragraphs of Nagel's book_ _The View from Nowhere_ _(the first five_ _paragraphs below) indicate the general distinction he proposes between an_ _individual's subjective view of things or subjective standpoint as against an objective_ _or external view of things that is nobody's in particular._.

Human beings have the unique ability to view the world in a detached way: We can think about the world in terms that transcend our own experience or interest, and consider the world from a vantage point that is, in Nagel's words, "nowhere in particular". At the same time, each of us is a particular person in a particular place, each with his own "personal" view of the world, a view that we can recognize as just one aspect of the (...) whole. How do we reconcile these two standpoints--intellectually, morally, and practically? To what extent are they irreconcilable and to what extent can they be integrated? Thomas Nagel's ambitious and lively book tackles this fundamental issue, arguing that our divided nature is the root of a whole range of philosophical problems, touching, as it does, every aspect of human life. He deals with its manifestations in such fields of philosophy as: the mind-body problem, personal identity, knowledge and skepticism, thought and reality, free will, ethics, the relation between moral and other values, the meaning of life, and death. Excessive objectification has been a malady of recent analytic philosophy, claims Nagel, it has led to implausible forms of reductionism in the philosophy of mind and elsewhere. The solution is not to inhibit the objectifying impulse, but to insist that it learn to live alongside the internal perspectives that cannot be either discarded or objectified. Reconciliation between the two standpoints, in the end, is not always possible. (shrink)

I propose a theory of freedom of choice on which it is a variable quality of individual conscious choices that has several dimensions that admit of degrees, even though - as many theorists have traditionally supposed - it also has as a necessary condition the possession of a capacity that is all or nothing. I argue that the proposed account better fits the phenomenology of ostensibly free actions, as well as empirical findings in the human sciences.

Introduction -- The nature of free will -- Requirements of freedom : preeminently deliberation -- Free will requires the absence of thought-external -- Determination over choices and decisions -- Choice and decision are crucial -- Doing and trying -- Free action and agent causality -- Modes of freedom -- Metaphysical and moral freedom -- Moral freedom is removed by manipulation and especially -- Compulsion -- Intention and moral standing -- Moral freedom of the will involves agent intent and motivation -- (...) Ramifications of freedom -- Free will requires up-to-the-end revisability but this does not gainsay probabilistic predictability -- Issues of revision and control -- The counterfactual dimension : "could have done otherwise" -- Problem cases : machines and lunatics -- Free will as outside causality but compatible with it -- Averting the zenonic fallacy of casual regression -- Averting predetermination (contrasting pre-determination with precedence determination) -- The crucial contrast between events and eventuations -- Choices and decisions as terminating eventuations -- Free will stands outside the stream of natural causality -- On freedom and causality -- Free will excludes pre-determinism but not motive determinism -- Motivational determinism vs. casual necessitation -- Motivations and motives -- Freedom from what? : certainly not from one's own motives -- And reasons: freedom demands motivational determination -- Free will requires motivational determinism -- Determination by one's autonomous motives is the crux of moral freedom -- Compulsion is impulsion -- Objections to motive determinism can be met -- Freedom and motivation -- Must an agent choose his motives for a decision to qualify (morally) as free? -- Freedom does not require motivational self-construction -- Does freedom require self-understanding? -- Willing to will : does freedom require the will to be self-endorsing? -- Does freedom require the approval of intellect and reason? -- Does freedom require self-approved motives? -- Buridan's ass : a random willfulness is not freedom -- Compatibilism regains : what free will excludes is not agent -- Determination but gant-bypassing nature determination -- The explanation of free acts via agent determination -- Freedom, responsibility, and "could have done otherwise" -- Reasons and motives impel but do not compel -- Compatibilism again -- Mind-matter partnership -- A two-sided coin -- The issue of initiative -- A salient duality -- Mind-brain interaction works by coordination not by causality -- Does free will exist? deliberations -- Pro and con -- On evidentiating free will -- Is free will unscientific? -- So does science counter-indicate free will -- Free-will naturalism and evolution. (shrink)