Abstract

Gives an account principally of Schopenhauer's essay On the Freedom of the Human Will. He argues that human willing is determined by the combination of motives and the character of the agent. Self‐consciousness is not capable of deciding whether or not the agent could have willed otherwise, but an objective view dictates that all actions are necessitated by their cause. Despite this, Schopenhauer argues that our sense of being responsible for our actions remains, and he attempts to account for it in terms of a responsibility for our intelligible characters.