Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;In common with a great many philosophical problems, free will/determinism has something of a chequered history. In the same way in which it may come more easily to say what it is that empiricism denies rather than what it asserts, we could fairly painlessly grant the likes of Strawson that the terms "free will" and "determinism" do not each, within philosophical history, mark off single unambiguous theories going up for grabs. To see this, however, as a reason for denying the authenticity of the free will/determinism problem would also commit one to denying the credibility, I expect, of most classical problems of philosophy, e.g. empiricism/rationalism, realism/idealism, monism/dualism, and perhaps most famously of all the analytic/synthetic distinction. I expect that neither Strawson nor Austin would want to do this. Here again, free will/determinism strikes me as merely typically philosophical; the various attempts throughout philosophical history at stating both theories have been attempts, for better or worse, at stating some fundamental intuition, itself felt in the most deep and primitive way, and resulting from observations, intuitions, reflections and worries about ourselves, the world, and the interaction between ourselves and the world