Free Will: Sourcehood and Its Alternatives

Front Cover
Bloomsbury Academic, Sep 23, 2008 - Philosophy - 155 pages

Much contemporary scholarship on free will focuses on whether it is compatible with causal determinism. According to compatibilists, it is possible for an agent to be determined in all her choices and actions and still be free. Incompatibilists, on the other hand, think that the existence of free will is incompatible with the truth of determinism. There are two dominant general conceptions of the nature of free will. According to the first of these, free will is primarily a function of being able to do otherwise than one in fact does. On this view, free will centrally depends upon alternative possibilities. The second approach focuses instead on issues of sourcehood, holding that free will is primarily a function of an agent being the source of her actions in a particular way. This book demarcates these two different conceptions free will, explores the relationship between them, and examines how they relate to the debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists. It ultimately argues for a version of Source Incompatibilism.

Other editions - View all

About the author (2008)

Kevin Timpe is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northwest Nazarene University, USA, and Templeton Research Fellow at St. Peter's College, University of Oxford, UK. He is the author of Free Will: Sourcehood and Its Alternatives (Continuum, 2008) and editor of Metaphysics and God (Routledge, 2009) and Arguing about Religion (Routledge, 2009). His recent publications have appeared in Philosophical Studies, American Philosophical Quarterly, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Faith and Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Philosophia. He is Philosophy of Religion Area Editor for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Bibliographic information