Abstract

The notion of alternative possibilities plays a key role in the contemporary debate on free will; yet, depending on the author’s perspective, it may be interpreted in deeply conflicting ways. Specifically, libertarians understand it as a genuine possibility, to be exerted in the actual world and in the present moment, while compatibilists project it into an alternate reality, where a given action has different antecedents. Using a geometric metaphor, we could refer to a divergent paradigm of possibility versus a parallel one. Though legitimate from a formal point of view, the compatibilist reading is at odds with our intuitive self-perception as free agents, which involves a feeling of causal openness of our actions – not those I might perform under different circumstances, but those I perform here and now. The divergent paradigm is confronted in turn by some serious conceptual problems, and ultimately results either in a paralysis of the will, or in the activity of some mysterious entity such as Fate or Fortune. As a response, in the last part of the paper I outline a different paradigm, which I call circular, where an act and its rational explanation are linked by a mutual entailment: in this context, alternative possibilities are instantiated by setting up from the beginning a different explanatory circle.