According to many criteria, agency, intentionality, responsibility and freedom of decision, require conscious decisions. Freud already assumed that many of our decisions are influenced by dynamically unconscious motives or that we even perform unconscious actions based on completely unconscious considerations. Such actions might not be intentional, and perhaps not even actions in the narrow sense, we would not be responsible for them and freedom of decision would be missing. Recent psychological and neurophysiological research has added to this (...) a number of phenomena (the "new unconscious") in which behavior is completely unconscious or in which the decision or its execution is influenced by unconscious factors: priming, automatic behavior, habitualized behavior, actions based on plain unconscious deliberations, intrusion of information from the dorsal pathway, etc. However, since this makes up the largest part of the behavior which is generally regarded as action, intentionality, yet agency, responsibility and even compatibilist freedom of decision for the largest part of our behavior may be threatened. Such considerations have led to a lively debate, which, however, suffers from generalizations that lump all these unconscious phenomena together. In contrast, the aim of this article is to discuss individual unconscious influences on our behavior separately with respect to what extent they require changes in traditional conceptualizations. The first part (2-4) of the article outlines the "traditions" and their elaborations: the intentional causalist concept of action, an associated empirical theory of action and standard concepts of responsibility and compatibilist freedom of decision, as well as the challenges for them. In the second part (5-9), the aforementioned unconscious influences on our actions (except for automated and habitualized actions, which I discuss elsewhere) are examined: 1. unconscious priming, 2. dynamically unconscious motives, 3. dorsal pathway information influencing conscious decisions, 4. unconsciously altered execution of conscious intentions, 5. unconscious deliberations and decisions. To what extent do these phenomena C1. require a change in the concept of action, C2. curtail intentionality or agency, C3. responsibility and C4. freedom? The result is: The curtailments prove to be far less dramatic than they initially appear; they require more watchfulness but no conceptual change. (shrink)

The recent debates about the nature of social freedom, understood in a broadly negative way, have generated three main views of the topic: these represent freedom respectively as non-limitation, non-interference and non-domination. The participants in these debates often go different ways, however, because they address different topics under common names, not because they hold different intuitions on common topics. Social freedom is sometimes understood as option-freedom, sometimes as agency-freedom and the different directions taken by (...) the theories can often be explained by their addressing freedom in one sense, then in another. The non-limitation approach focuses primarily on option-freedom, the non-domination approach on agencyfreedom, whereas the representation of freedom as non-interference seems to spring from a failure to resolve the focus decisively on one target or another. (shrink)

In this book, Binder shows that at the heart of the most prominent arguments in favour of value-neutral approaches to overall freedom lies the value freedom has for human agency and development. Far from leading to the adoption of a value-neutral approach, however, ascribing importance to freedom’s agency value requires one to adopt a refined value-based approach. Binder employs an axiomatic framework in order to develop such an approach. She shows that a focus on (...) class='Hi'>freedom’s agency value has far reaching consequences for existing results in the freedom ranking literature: it requires one to move beyond a person’s given all-things-considered preferences to the values underlying a person’s preference formation. Furthermore, it requires, as Binder argues, one to account for those differences between choice options which really matter to people. Binder illustrates the implications of her analysis for the evaluation of public policy and human development with the capability approach: only if sufficient importance is ascribed to freedom’s agency value can the capability approach keep its promises. ​. (shrink)

This book employs Heidegger’s work of the 1920s and early 1930s to develop distinctively Heideggerian accounts of agency, freedom, and responsibility, making the case that Heidegger’s thought provides a compelling alternative to the mainstream philosophical accounts of these concepts.

Abstract: How can the decisions of “autonomous” individuals provide a rationale for freedom and self-governance if a mechanical and causal sense of the self leads us to question the foundational nature of the individual? If most of our decisions originate in brain function below the level of consciousness, we live in a virtual world produced by mechanisms outside our control, arising from transparent self-models of which we are not aware. “Opacity,” the gift of not perceiving directly, of not automatically (...) believing what we are experiencing, is precisely what makes it possible for us to question our first-person perspectives. While we do not have direct access to the mechanisms that give rise to our sense of ourselves, our investigation can make it possible for us to analyze and understand those very mechanisms consciously. The deployment of that knowledge in the act of decision making and the infinite regress of interacting conscious individuals underlies our existential freedom. (shrink)

This collection consists of original contributions that represent the state of the art of philosophical research on agency, free will, and moral responsibility. It should be of interest to both specialists and students with research interests in the philosophy of action and moral psychology.

This paper deals with the issue of self-determination and agency in moral action. On the one hand, it seems that where possible, the moral agent should use their practical reason to identify what it is right for them to do, and act accordingly; on the other hand, this seems to leave little room for the agent to decide for themselves how to act, where this is often said to be a marker of freedom and how the will is (...) exercised. In response to this difficulty, Ruth Chang has argued recently that at least some reasons themselves need to be seen as being created through an act of will. Looking at the work of Iris Murdoch, it is argued that this response is problematic. At the same time, it is also argued that Murdoch can provide a fruitful way of dealing with this problem through her account of the imagination. This gives a role to the will of the agent, not in creating reasons, but in attuning us to those reasons, thereby locating the will within practical reasoning itself and showing how the authority of the good can be made compatible with human freedom. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

A symposium on Cressida Heyes' 2007 book Self-Transformations.

The Zhuangzi, a 4th century BCE Chinese text, is optimistic about life unrestrained by entrenched values. This paper contributes to existing debates on Zhuangzian freedom in three ways. First, it reflects on how it is possible to enjoy the freedom envisaged in the Zhuangzi. Many discussions welcome the Zhuangzi’s picture of release from life shaped by canonical visions, without also giving thought to life without these driving visions. Consider this scenario: in a world with limitless possibilities, would it (...) not be fraught, not knowing how to interpret situations? I suggest that freedom in the Zhuangzi is possible only if one succeeds in reorienting herself to the new ‘normal’. Second, I introduce and develop the idea of working with constraints. This focuses on an agent's maximizing the fit between relevant conditions, on the one hand, and their capabilities, on the other. Finally, I propose that self-directed practice, an important expression of agency, is required for building capabilities that enable such freedom. I examine the idea of risk involved in these firsthand experiences, articulating an account of agency that sits at the heart of hard-won Zhuangzian freedom. (shrink)

This paper concerns the relationship between two questions. The first is a question about inner freedom: What is it to be rendered unfree, not by external obstacles, but by aspects of oneself? The second is a question about agency: What is it to fail at being a thing that genuinely acts, and instead to be a thing that is merely acted upon, passive in relation to its own behaviour? It is widely believed that answers to the first question (...) must rest on or be partly explained by answers to the second. Here I argue that this is a mistake: losses of inner freedom are not, after all, explicable in terms of failures of agency. To establish this conclusion, I consider three familiar lines of thought that appear to tie ideas about inner freedom to ideas about agency, each relating to a different conception of inner freedom: absence of inner constraint, self-government, and absence of determination by external forces. I argue that, in each case, any apparent conceptual reliance on a special conception of agency is merely illusory, the result being that we must allow clear water between our theories of inner freedom and our theories of agency. This conclusion is of significance for contemporary theories of agency and personal autonomy, as well as for ‘positive’ conceptions of political liberty. (shrink)

A companion volume to Free Will: A Philosophical Study, this new anthology collects influential essays on free will, including both well-known contemporary classics and exciting recent work. Agency and Responsibility: Essays on the Metaphysics of Freedom is divided into three parts. The essays in the first section address metaphysical issues concerning free will and causal determinism. The second section groups papers presenting a positive account of the nature of free action, including competing compatibilist and incompatibilist analyses. The third (...) section concerns free will and moral responsibility, including theories of moral responsibility and the challenge to an alternative possibilities condition posed by Frankurt-type scenarios. Distinguished by its balance and consistently high quality, the volume presents papers selected for their significance, innovation, and clarity of expression. Contributors include Harry Frankfurt, Peter van Inwagen, David Lewis, Elizabeth Anscombe, John Martin Fischer, Michael Bratman, Roderick Chisholm, Robert Kane, Peter Strawson, and Susan Wolf. The anthology serves as an up-to-date resource for scholars as well as a useful text for courses in ethics, philosophy of religion, or metaphysics. In addition, paired with Free Will: A Philosophical Study, it would form an excellent upper-level undergraduate or graduate-level course in free will, responsibility, motivation, or action theory. (shrink)

Hegel’s Logic reveals an insightful and subtle engagement with the traditional problem of free will as it emerges from our basic commitment to the explicability of the world. While the dominant current interpretations of Hegel’s theory of agency find little of significance in the Logic and suggest that Hegel avoided the traditional problem, Yeomans argues both that the problem is unavoidable, and that the two versions of the Logic fruitfully engage the tensions between explicability and both the control and (...) alternate possibilities constitutive of free agency. In particular, Yeomans examines Hegel’s response to three different versions of the principle of sufficient reason that have historically seemed to make free will problematic. The central three chapters take up each of these versions in turn. For each, Yeomans first explores the nature of its challenge to free will with glances both at Hegel’s precursors and contemporaries and at the philosophy of action of our own time. Then Yeomans delves into the arguments of Hegel’s Logic to see how he construed the problematic concepts in question. Finally, Yeomans returns to the issue of free will to bring Hegel’s interpretations of the concepts in the Logic together with elements of his moral psychology from his practical philosophy both to show how the problem of free will can be resolved, and to trace in outline the shape of free will that such a resolution produces. The key connection between the Logic’s reflections on the form of explanation and the practical philosophy’s theory of the will is that both attempt to do justice to the mutual necessity of self-determination and external influence. (shrink)

The Zhuangzi, a 4th century BCE Chinese text, is optimistic about life unrestrained by entrenched values. This paper contributes to existing debates on Zhuangzian freedom in three ways. First, it reflects on how it is possible to enjoy the freedom envisaged in the Zhuangzi. Many discussions welcome the Zhuangzi’s picture of release from life shaped by canonical visions, without also giving thought to life without these driving visions. Consider this scenario: in a world with limitless possibilities, would it (...) not be fraught, not knowing how to interpret situations? I suggest that freedom in the Zhuangzi is possible only if one succeeds in reorienting herself to the new ‘normal’. Second, I introduce and develop the idea of working with constraints. This focuses on an agent's maximizing the fit between relevant conditions, on the one hand, and their capabilities, on the other. Finally, I propose that self-directed practice, an important expression of agency, is required for building capabilities that enable such freedom. I examine the idea of risk involved in these firsthand experiences, articulating an account of agency that sits at the heart of hard-won Zhuangzian freedom. (shrink)

This paper first distinguishes three alternative views that adherents to both incompatibilism and PAP may take as to what constitutes an agent''s determining or controlling her action (if it''s not the action''s being deterministically caused by antecedent events): the indeterministic-causation view, the agent-causation view, and "simple indeterminism." The bulk of the paper focusses on the dispute between simple indeterminism - the view that the occurrence of a simple mental event is determined by its subject if it possesses the "actish" phenomenal (...) quality and is undetermined by antecedent events - and Timothy O''Connor''s agent-causation view. It defends simple indeterminism against O''Connor''s objections to it and offers objections to O''Connor''s view. (shrink)

This paper considers Aquinas's accounts of the end of human action and the structure of human action, examines the debate between intellectualist and voluntarist interpretations of Aquinas, and corrects mistaken accounts of Aquinas's views on freedom, necessitation, and causation.

While Nietzsche's rejection of metaphysical free will and moral desert has been widely recognised, the sense in which Nietzsche continues to use the term freedom affirmatively remains largely unnoticed. The aim of this article is to show that freedom and agency are among Nietzsche’s central concerns, that his much-discussed interest in power in fact originates in a first-person account of freedom, and that his understanding of the phenomenology of freedom informs his theory of agency. (...) He develops a non-reductive drive-psychological motivational theory: reflective judgement and reasons can motivate by means of affective orientations agents have due to their drives. In particular, due to a standing desire or 'instinct for freedom' agents can generate, in mental simulations, the necessary motivational affects to unify their drives in view of certain long-term goals. (shrink)

This paper argues for the replacement of the Principle of Alternate Possibilities by an alternative principle, the Principle of Possible Non-Performance, which it is argued represents an important improvement on the Principle of Alternate Possibilities in the context of Frankfurt-style examples. The suggestion that the principle offers only the possibility of something insufficiently 'robust' to supply a decent replacement to PAP is countered.

In these essays, Hugh J. McCann develops a unified perspective on human action. Written over a period of twenty-five years, the essays provide a comprehensive survey of the major topics in contemporary action theory. In four sections, the book addresses the ontology of action ; the foundations of action ; intention, will, and freedom; and practical rationality. McCann works out a compromise between competing perspectives on the individuation of action ; explores the foundations of action and defends a volitional (...) theory; argues for a libertarian view of both the formation and the execution of intention; and considers the question of consistency in rational intentions, as well as the relationship between practical and theoretical reasoning. -/- Among the original features of McCann's work are his defense of both fine- and coarse-grained actions and his arguments for a noncausal theory of the relation between intention and action. He also suggests that intentions need not be consistent, either with each other or with beliefs about success. And he contends that intention formation is an intrinsically ratiocinative procedure, distinct from reasoning about what action would be best. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

The paper spells out agency in a manner sympathetic to the approach in Helen Steward’s A Metaphysics for Freedom ; argues that agency so construed is compatible with determinism; then argues that this is a costly victory for compatibilism.

This innovative approach to freedom starts from an account of what we mean by describing someone, in a psychological vein, as a free subject. Pettit develops an argument as to what it is that makes someone free in that basic sense; and then goes on to derive the implications of the approach for issues of freedom in political theory. Freedom in the subject is equated with the person's being fit to be held responsible and to be authorized (...) as a partner in interaction. This book is unique among contemporary approaches - although it is true to the spirit of classical writers like Hobbes and Kant - in seeking a theory that applies to psychological issues of free agency and free will as well as to political issues in the theory of the free state and the free constitution. The driving thesis is that it is only by connecting up the different issues of freedom, psychological and political, that we can fully appreciate the nature of the questions involved, and the requirements for their resolution. The book does not not seek a comprehensive reach just for its own sake, but rather for the sake of the illumination it provides._ _ _A Theory of Freedom_ is a ground-breaking volume which will be of wide interest to scholars and students in political philosophy and political science. (shrink)

Free action and microphysical determination are incompatible but this is so only in virtue of a genuine conflict between microphysical determination with any active behavior. I introduce active behavior as the veridicality condition of agentive experiences and of perceptual experiences and argue that these veridicality conditions are fulfilled in many everyday cases of human and non-human behavior and that they imply the incompatibility of active behavior with microphysical determination. The main purpose of the paper is to show that the view (...) proposed about active behavior leads to a natural compromise between libertarianism and compatibilism, which avoids the flaws of both positions while preserving their central insights. (shrink)

Why does agency--the capacity to make choices and to act in the world--matter to us? Why is it meaningful that our intentions have effects in the world, that they reflect our sense of identity, that they embody what we value? What kinds of motivations are available for political agency and judgment in an age that lacks the enthusiasm associated with the great emancipatory movements for civil rights and gender equality? What are the conditions for the possibility of being (...) an effective agent when the meaning of democracy has become less transparent? David Kyuman Kim addresses these crucial questions by uncovering the political, moral, philosophical, and religious dimensions of human agency. Kim treats agency as a form of religious experience that reflects implicit and explicit notions of the good. Of particular concern are the moral, political, and religious motivations that underpin an understanding of agency as meaningful action. Through a critical engagement with the work of theorists such as Judith Butler, Charles Taylor, and Stanley Cavell, Kim argues that late modern and postmodern agency is found most effectively at work in what he calls "projects of regenerating agency" or critical and strategic responses to loss. Agency as melancholic freedom begins and endures, Kim maintains, through the moral and psychic losses associated with a broad range of experiences, including the moral identities shaped by secularized modernity and the multifold forms of alienation experienced by those who suffer the indignities of racial, gender, class, and sexuality discrimination and oppression. Kim calls for renewing the sense of urgency in our political and moral engagements by seeing agency as a vocation, where the aspiration for self-transformation and the human need for hope are fundamental concerns. (shrink)

Why does agency-the capacity to make choices and to act in the world-matter to us? Why is it meaningful that our intentions have effects in the world, that they reflect our sense of identity, that they embody what we value? David Kyuman Kim addresses these crucial questions by uncovering the political, moral, philosophical, and religious dimensions of human agency. Through a critical engagement with the work of theorists such as Judith Butler, Charles Taylor, and Stanley Cavell, Kim argues (...) that late modern and postmodern agency is found most effectively at work in what he calls "projects of regenerating agency" or critical and strategic responses to loss. Agency as melancholic freedom begins and endures, Kim maintains, through the moral and psychic losses associated with a broad range of experiences, including the moral identities shaped by secularized modernity and the multifold forms of alienation experienced by those who suffer the indignities of racial, gender, class, and sexuality discrimination and oppression. Kim calls for renewing the sense of urgency in our political and moral engagements by seeing agency as a vocation, where the aspiration for self-transformation and the human need for hope are fundamental concerns. (shrink)

In this paper, the goal is to investigate the nature of freedom enjoyed by participants in collective agency. Specifically, we aim to address the fol- lowing questions: in what respects are participants in collective agency able to exercise freedom in some weaker or stronger sense? In what ways is such col- lective or common freedom distinct from the freedom ascribed to individuals? Might there be different sorts of freedoms involved in and tolerated by collec- (...) tive agency, each of which has its own role in determining the nature and effi- cacy of the bond uniting its participants? Clarification of just what such free- dom may involve and how it subsists within collective agency is not only im- portant for being able to demonstrate the instrumental value of social ontology to contemporary political debates. It may likewise contribute an important di- mension to the descriptive psychology of collective agency and shared inten- tionality, which is an approach deserving of more attention. Here, such clari- fication is undertaken via a comparison to the notions of freedom at stake in the respective accounts of sociality and collective agency provided by Raimo Tuomela and Jean-Paul Sartre. (shrink)

I argue that, contrary to the opinion of Wes Morriston, William Rowe, and others, a supremely perfect God, if one should exist, would be the freest of all beings and would represent the clearest example of what it means to act freely. I suggest further that, if we regard human freedom as a reflection of God’s ideal freedom, we can avoid some of the pitfalls in both the standard libertarian and the standard compatibilist accounts of freewill.

IN HIS EARLY, UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS ON ETHICS, Schleiermacher sketched the framework for a theory of human agency in which he defends a soft determinist view of freedom. He developed his theory as an alternative to noumenal causality, which he had come to reject as inconsistent with a comprehensive scientific conception of the world. Even as a young student, Schleiermacher was convinced that some form of naturalism is inescapable—we are firmly rooted within nature and history—and that, accordingly, our conceptions (...) of morality and religion, to some extent, must be carved out within a naturalistic framework. Naturally, Schleiermacher found transcendental freedom to be an indefensible exception to natural causation and to our interconnectedness with the natural world. Equally important, he found it to be unnecessary for and an obstacle to a sound moral theory. In his early notebooks we find the following entry: “Speculative reason’s concept of transcendental freedom is indispensable only for an otherworldly subject.” Yet, on the first page of his treatise on freedom, Schleiermacher highlights the impasse between Kantian and Leibnizian conceptions of freedom and intimates his dissatisfaction with both theories. The dissatisfaction with Leibniz, though never directly stated, stems from Leibniz’s atomistic conception of causality and inspires Schleiermacher to think seriously about issues in moral psychology which had been ignored or left undeveloped in the Leibnizian and, as it turns out, Kantian views. As we shall see, Schleiermacher discerned that human action originates from a complex constellation. (shrink)

Book synopsis: The London School of Economics and Political Science has embraced the full range of the social sciences and its related disciplines. Contributors to this book were invited to write on the subject of freedom. The volume is an exemplary reflection of the variety, the individuality, the different interests, and the range of assumptions found in the scholars of the LSE. The authors come from varied backgrounds - linguistics, mathematics, computer science, sociology, geography, economics, industrial relations, anthropology, political (...) science. They provide a stimulating array of viewpoints on the universally discussed issue of freedom. (shrink)

This special volume of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility presents ten new papers marking the fiftieth anniversary of P. F. Strawson's landmark essay, 'Freedom and Resentment'. They offer critical interpretation of Strawson's essay, expand on his insights into interpersonal relationships, and develop his themes in challenging directions.

The following essay has three main objectives. (1) By arguing that the connection between Schelling’s reception of Plato and Kant’s conception of genius is relevant for Schelling’s early development, I show that Schelling’s early Idealism brings to the general problem that plagues German Idealists, i.e., the search for an unconditioned principle that unites theoretical and practical reason, the solution that is genuinely his own. This original solution consists in Schelling’s conception of “creative reason [schöpfersiche Vernunft].” Because the scholarship on German (...) Idealism has thus far been focused predominantly on the analysis of self-consciousness, Schelling’s conception of creative reason remained neglected. (2) I show that the theme of an absolutely free creative subjectivity is shared by many of Schelling’s early works and, hence, I argue that the early development of his Idealism can be interpreted as a beginning of a philosophical system or as a “proto-system” of what is later to become The System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). (3) I evaluate Schelling’s speculative extension of Kant’s notion of creative subjectivity and argue that, when compared to Kant’s notion of genius, Schelling’s ‘absolute I’ should be considered a regress rather than a progress. (shrink)

Moore in Ethics, ch. vii, writes – if I understand him right – that our basic experience of free-will resides in our certain feeling, in regard to our past actions, that we could have acted differently if we had so chosen; more exactly, that we should have acted differently if we had so chosen, which precisely means that we could have acted differently. He adds the qualifying adverb ‘sometimes’; I think we may well say always, keeping in mind, of course, (...) that we are only concerned here with ‘actions’ proper, as contrasted with involuntary movements, twitchings, starts, fits, etc., and also with wholly habitual, routine-like movements or manipulations performed without any attention and without the slightest deliberation, and that only such actions are meant here as are within our range of physical or psycho-physical power, which is anyhow implicit in the concept of choice: there is no sense in my saying that I might here and now ‘choose’ to carry this building on my back to Paris, to dismiss the present Government or to continue writing in impeccable Japanese. However, Moore is aware of the clearly meaningful objection that ‘acting as we choose’ would not establish the fact of free-will unless it were also the case that our choice itself is free, in other words that we not only choose to act so instead of acting differently but also choose to choose so instead of choosing differently. He argues that this too is indeed the case, emphasising in this context our experience of the unpredictability, even by ourselves, of our future choices. He concludes, though, on a note of doubt which shows that he is not quite sure in his own mind to have definitively disposed of the objection. (shrink)

Moore in Ethics, ch. vii, writes – if I understand him right – that our basic experience of free-will resides in our certain feeling, in regard to our past actions, that we could have acted differently if we had so chosen; more exactly, that we should have acted differently if we had so chosen, which precisely means that we could have acted differently. He adds the qualifying adverb ‘sometimes’; I think we may well say always, keeping in mind, of course, (...) that we are only concerned here with ‘actions’ proper, as contrasted with involuntary movements, twitchings, starts, fits, etc., and also with wholly habitual, routine-like movements or manipulations performed without any attention and without the slightest deliberation, and that only such actions are meant here as are within our range of physical or psycho-physical power, which is anyhow implicit in the concept of choice: there is no sense in my saying that I might here and now ‘choose’ to carry this building on my back to Paris, to dismiss the present Government or to continue writing in impeccable Japanese. However, Moore is aware of the clearly meaningful objection that ‘acting as we choose’ would not establish the fact of free-will unless it were also the case that our choice itself is free, in other words that we not only choose to act so instead of acting differently but also choose to choose so instead of choosing differently. He argues that this too is indeed the case, emphasising in this context our experience of the unpredictability, even by ourselves, of our future choices. He concludes, though, on a note of doubt which shows that he is not quite sure in his own mind to have definitively disposed of the objection. (shrink)

In "Kant on Freedom and Rational Agency", I aim to give a comprehensive interpretation and a qualified defense of Kant’s doctrine of freedom as a systematic conception of rational agency. -/- Although my book follows Kant in focusing on the idea of free will as a condition of moral agency, it denies that moral freedom of will is the only relevant (transcendental) type of freedom. Human beings also exercise absolute freedom of thought (...) (intellectual autonomy) in their theoretical cognition. Moreover, our creation and appreciation of beauty requires our freedom of imagination. I consider these three varieties of free agency both in their own rights and in their systematic connections, by examining how they differ from and yet relate to each other. On this basis, my interpretation shows that and why for Kant transcendental freedom is the proper anchor ("cardinal point") of all meaningful, rational human activity: our moral efforts to become more virtuous and to make the world a better place; our theoretical efforts to understand, explain and predict the world; and our aesthetic engagement with the world of beauty, both artistic and natural. -/- Additionally, "Kant on Freedom and Rational Agency" illuminates Kant's intricate, multifaceted account by considering the various metaphysical, semantic, epistemological and normative dimensions of Kantian freedom and by revealing their systematic interconnections. One significant benefit of tracing these links is that by doing so we can arrive at a charitable view of how Kant seeks to justify the belief in moral freedom of will. -/- For many commentators, Kant's appeal to a moral ‘fact of reason’ as our basis for believing in supersensible free will is an abject philosophical failure or a lapse into dogmatic rationalism. By contrast, I show that Kant justifies our belief in free will through a rather powerful, two-pronged argumentative strategy. First, he constructs a practical-moral proof of free will via the fact of reason doctrine. Second, he provides a theoretical defense of this moral proof against challenges arising from a naturalistic worldview. The linchpin of this defense is his argument that naturalistic cognizers must presuppose their epistemic freedom of thought as a necessary condition of all objective theoretical (including naturalistic) cognition. Since epistemic freedom of thought and moral freedom of will are both species of transcendental freedom, naturalists cannot (coherently) debunk our practical self-conception as transcendentally free moral agents. The appeal to epistemic freedom of thought provides no positive grounds for believing in a free moral will; but it shields our moral self-awareness (which does provide such grounds) against its most prominent detractors. -/- This defense strategy (among other aspects of Kant’s view that I examine in my book) shows that a significant part of Kant’s legacy is his abiding potential to challenge and provide alternatives to a naturalistic philosophical worldview (held by the “defender of an omnipotent nature”) according to which the mechanistic order of nature engulfs all metaphysical reality and (thereby) our entire humanity. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to provide a critical analysis of the Kantian notion of freedom (especially the problem of the third antinomy and its resolution in the critique of pure reason); its significance in the contemporary debate on free-will and determinism, and the possibility of autonomy of artificial agency in the Kantian paradigm of autonomy. Kant's resolution of the third antinomy by positing the ground in the noumenal self resolves the problem of antinomies; however, invites an (...) explanatory gap between phenomenality and the noumenal self; even if he has successfully established the compatibility of natural causality and non-natural causality through his transcendental argument. This paper is also devoted to establishing the plausibility of the knowledge claim that Kantian reduction of phenomenality has served half of the purpose of the AI scientists on the possibility of Artificial Autonomous Agency. (shrink)