About this topic
Summary | Most philosophers and laypeople believe that under most conditions human beings, perhaps along with some other animals, possess a power of selecting and implementing actions which is special. This power is very widely held to be a necessary condition of responsibility for actions, for autonomy and for being entitled to take pride in (or to feel shame for) one's achievements. The free will debate in philosophy aims at elucidating the nature of that power as well as at identifying potential threats to it and explaining how it can exist. A major focus of the debate is the compatibility of free will with causal determinism. A minority of philosophers deny that we have free will because free will is incompatible with causal determinism. |
Key works | The free will debate is ancient in Western philosophy, but was first developed systematically by scholastic thinkers concerning about the relationship free will and God's foreknowledge (eg Ockham 1983). The rise of mechanistic science brought determinism to the forefront and played an important role in the development of compatibilism by philosophers like Hume (Hume 1751). The advent of Frankfurt-style cases (Frankfurt 1969) transformed the late 20th century debate, by allowing compatibilists to dispense with the principle of alternate possibilities (see Widerker & McKenna 2003 for important contributions to this debate). At the same time, important new libertarian views have been developed by thinkers like Robert Kane (Kane 1996) and Timothy O'Connor (O'Connor 2000). Very recently, there has been a revival of free will skepticism (Strawson 1994; Levy 2011). |
Introductions | O'Connor & Franklin 2018;McKenna 2008; Clarke & Capes ms |
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The Will* (265)
Theories of Free Will (4,759 | 1,148)
Agent Causation (287)
Compatibilism (992)
Free Will Skepticism (254)
Identification Theories (101)
Incompatibilism (675)
Semi-Compatibilism (208)
Theories of Freedom* (398)
Moral Responsibility* (3,149 | 734)
Free Will, Misc (283)
- Consciousness of Action (252)
- Epiphenomenalism (206)
- Mental Actions (296)
- Neural Timing and Consciousness (135)
- Control and Consciousness (132)
- Action and Consciousness in Psychology (269)
- Hypnosis and Consciousness (288)
- Experimental Philosophy: Free Will (133)
- Aquinas: Free Will (1)
- Hobbes: Free Will (50)
- Hume: Free Will (49)
- Locke: Free Will (85)
- Popper: Free Will (12)
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