Abstract
Peter van Inwagen attempts to demonstrate the apparent incompatibility of free will and indeterminism through an imaginative thought experiment. He imagines God repeatedly “rolling the world back” to its state one minute prior to the performance of an undetermined, putatively free action and then letting it “go forward” again. Van Inwagen argues that the outcome most friendly to the supposition that the agent acted freely, in which she does otherwise about half the time, is one which apparently shows that her original act was a matter of chance, and thus not free. I argue that neither this outcome nor any other implies that her action was not free.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Ibid., p. 15.
Peter Van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 128f. See also “Free Will Remains a Mystery,” op. cit., p. 13f.
“Free Will Remains a Mystery,” op. cit., p. 17.
See An Essay on Free Will, op. cit., pp. 138–140.
Metaphysics 1026b31–37.
An Essay on Free Will, op. cit., p. 216.
I thank Steve Layman, Terence Cuneo, Kenneth Himma, Patrick McDonald and Andrew Jeffrey for useful comments and suggestions.
References
Van Inwagen, Peter (1983): An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Van Inwagen, Peter (1993): Metaphysics (Boulder: Westview Press).
Van Inwagen, Peter (2000): “Free Will Remains a Mystery,” Philosophical Perspectives 14, 1–19.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
About this article
Cite this article
Goggans, P. A New Version of the Mind Argument Refuted. Int Ontology Metaphysics 8, 203–209 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12133-007-0016-5
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12133-007-0016-5