Abstract

At least since the time of the ancient Greeks the question of whether human beings have freewill has been debated in both religious and philosophical circles. During this time, though, it has been thought that this is primarily a debate about the possibility of moral or perhaps legal responsibility. That this debate might concern other "types" of responsibility, for instance epistemic responsibility, has not been thoroughly considered. In a recent article on this subject it has been lamented that the "ideals of free will and free thought are not usually connected" . In fact, many theorists concerned with the idea of epistemic responsibility have argued that free thought or doxastic voluntarism is conceptually impossible and phenomenologically improbable. In my dissertation I challenge this separation of free thought and free will by employing a conceptual argument against doxastic non-voluntarism , an argument that was originally employed by Immanuel Kant as a proof for free moral agency. Hence I employ an argument that has been primarily relegated to the moral sphere, i.e., the sphere of freewill, in order to attempt to prove the conceptual necessity of freedom in the epistemic sphere, i.e., the sphere of free thought. In this way I hope to show the parallels between ethics and epistemology in terms of the positions that are maintained, and the commitments or assumptions that underlie them. This I believe will help to inform normative theory or inquiry in general by showing that the two major foci of this inquiry, epistemology and ethics, conduct themselves along the same basic lines