Arguments for incompatibilism

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2003/2017)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Determinism is a claim about the laws of nature: very roughly, it is the claim that everything that happens is determined by antecedent conditions together with the natural laws. Incompatibilism is a philosophical thesis about the relevance of determinism to free will: that the truth of determinism rules out the existence of free will. The incompatibilist believes that if determinism turned out to be true, it would also be true that we don't have, and have never had, free will. The compatibilist denies that determinism has the consequences the incompatibilist thinks it has. According to the compatibilist, the truth of determinism does not preclude the existence of free will. (Even if we learned tomorrow that determinism is true, it might still be true that we have free will.) The philosophical problem of free will and determinism is the problem of understanding, how, if at all, the truth of determinism might be compatible with the truth of our belief that we have free will. That is, it's the problem of deciding who is right: the compatibilist or the incompatibilist

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 84,213

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Consciousness, free will, and the unimportance of determinism.Galen Strawson - 1989 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 32 (March):3-27.
Determinism, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility.Gerald Dworkin (ed.) - 1970 - Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,: Prentice-Hall.
An Essay on Free Will.Peter Van Inwagen - 1983 - New York: Oxford University Press.
How free are you? The determinism problem.Ted Honderich - 2002 - In Robert H. Kane (ed.), Philosophical Quarterly. Oxford University Press. pp. 249.
Compatibilist alternatives.Joseph Keim Campbell - 2005 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 35 (3):387-406.

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
289 (#51,268)

6 months
22 (#81,346)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Kadri Vihvelin
University of Southern California

Citations of this work

Able to Do the Impossible.Jack Spencer - 2017 - Mind 126 (502):466-497.
The Soft-Line Solution to Pereboom's Four-Case Argument.Kristin Mickelson - 2010 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 88 (4):595-617.
Incompatibilism and the Past.Andrew M. Bailey - 2012 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (2):351-376.
Degrees of Freedom.Pieter Thyssen & Sylvia Wenmackers - 2021 - Synthese 198 (11):10207-10235.

View all 33 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

A treatise of human nature.David Hume & A. D. Lindsay - 2003 - Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications. Edited by Ernest Campbell Mossner.
Freedom of the will and the concept of a person.Harry G. Frankfurt - 1971 - Journal of Philosophy 68 (1):5-20.
Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility.John Martin Fischer & Mark Ravizza - 1998 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Mark Ravizza.
Moral dimensions: permissibility, meaning, blame.Thomas Scanlon - 2008 - Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

View all 271 references / Add more references