The issue of "free will" is a multi-front forever war in philosophy. What does the phrase mean? Do humans have it? Is it necessary for the coherence of important ideas about moral responsibility to presume that we have it? One of the fronts in the war involves conscious human intentions and their timing. Do we really form conscious intentions to do X before we do X? Or are conscious intentions just confabulated after the fact -- after our neurological unconscious has already reached a point of no return? And what notion of free will could survive a "yes" answer to that question? In 1983, an important paper, by Benjamin Libet at al, appearing in a scientific journal aptly entitled BRAIN, discussed experiments that seemed to show that humans make decisions before we are even aware of it. This seemed to destroy any intuitively plausible role for free will, or for the operation of "will" at all. But of late neurologists have been looking...
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You are looking for a second consecutive day at a fossil-disclosed jungle cat inspired by thought experiments over whether p was true already in ancient times. I go back today to the issue raised in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy in an article earlier this year by Fabio Lampert and John William Waldrop. The point is not to settle the issue of what is free will and is it real. The point, rather, is in logical analytical fashion to render clear "previously underappreciated constraints on defenses of closure-based arguments against the existence of free will." Who are they? Lampert is affiliated with the University of Vienna, apparently a postdoctoral researcher there. Waldrop's affiliation is with Notre Dame. They seem often to have worked together. As I understand it, they are saying that various promising arguments against free will require a principle of closure, and that whether they have such a principle available in the sens...
In the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Fabio Lampert and John William Waldrop recently offered a rather confusing argument about free will. They didn't argue for it or against it precisely, but sought to outline what a solid argument for it or against it might look like. They seem sure that no sound argument to either conclusion has appeared yet, despite the voluminous attempts. "Free will and intensional operators" is the title of their article, in the February 2026 issue. As one might expect, the phrase "intensional operators" plays a big part in their discussion. So does the word "closure". They don't really define what they mean by [epistemic] closure in this context, but I expect that it means here that for any domain of discussion X, the domain is closed if and only if we can safely add to our knowledge by taking the enatilment of what we know as also ... known. [This is different from causal closure.] Free will, for Lampert and Waldrop,...
Haven't read it yet but ... it does appear Kane was determined to get in a final word about the free-will controversy: https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/the-complex-tapestry-of-free-will-a-free-will-odyssey/ For years I've cited his 1990s work as a fine expression of the view with which I associate myself. Kane works from generally secular premises, and reaches a free-willist position that is indeterminist and incompatibilist, the old in-in combo, thereby establishing that certain Jamesian contentions remain in the running. Daniel Dennett (a determinist and compatibilist) replied to Kane and Kane was said to be working on a reply to THAT. Now Dennett and Kane have both shuffled off this mortal coil and this posthumous publication may be the last word in THAT exchange -- if it does contain the response to Dennett I had heard about -- although surely the broader philosophical argument will continue. I'm going to have to get this book.
Robert “Bob” Hilary Kane died on April 20, 2024, at the age of 85, after a brief illness. He spent his final moments surrounded by family and friends at his home in Guilford, CT. Kane had moved to Guilford in 2022, and I've read that until very recently he remained a regular at his grandchildren’s sporting events and noted for his daily walk on the town green. In lieu of flowers, his family suggests people contribute what they can to his preferred charities: The Union of Concerned Scientists , The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund , The National Alliance on Mental Illness , or Fair Vote . (Intriguing list of causes there.) But he isn't here because of any of that. He gets an obit on Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed because he was, for decades until his passing, the most distinguished contemporary advocate of the incompatibilist/ indeterminist view of the philosophical issue of free will, the view associated with William James, Isaiah Berlin, Ka...
A few words from a wise man. I did have good reasons for choosing as I did, which I'm willing to stand by and take responsibility for. If these reasons were not sufficient or conclusive reasons, that's because, like the heroine of the novel, I was not a fully formed person before I chose (and still am not, for that matter). Like the author of the novel, I am in the process of writing an unfinished story and forming an unfinished character who, in my case, is myself.
List criticizes the "causal exclusion" argument, which is a recent formulation of the case for epiphenomenalism in mind-body relations. By usual definition,"epiphenomenalism" is the view that though there is an intangible mind distinct from the body (there are such things as "intentions" for example, which may not be reducible to any physical sort of fact), this mind, these intentions DO NO WORK. They do not function as causes, just as the steam coming out of a train does nothing to move the train. The causal exclusion argument works from two premises: 1) the premise of the causal closure of the world. Any physically realized event has a sufficient physical cause. 2) the premise of causal exclusion. If an event has a sufficient cause, then it has no other distinct cause at the same time. I'm standing outside on the street and a cab comes by. I raise my arm in a familiar gesture. Why did I raise my arm? The first premise tells me that there ...
"According to [Angelika] Kratzer, the verb 'can' in a sentence such as 'A can do B' always comes with an additional, often implicit qualification of the form 'in view of X.' This qualification, if not specified explicitly, is determined by the context in which the sentence is uttered. For example, when we talk about what is humanly possible, we might say, 'We can walk, run, and jump, but not fly,' thereby referring to what we can do by way of the constraints of human physiology. When we talk about how we get from London to Paris, we might say, 'We can fly, take the Eurostar travel train, or travel by overnight bus,' thereby referring to what we can do in klight of the available means of transport. W might add, however, 'We cannot fly or take the Eurostar, because those options are too expensive.' this time referring to what we can do in view of our financial constraints." pp. 103-04 The point in the context of free will, L...
Here's a passage from the book WHY FREE WILL IS REAL by Christian List. of the London School of Economics. At one point (p. 74) List recommends what he calls the "naturalistic ontological attitude," that is, the view that "our best guide to any questions about which entities, properties, or phenomena exist in any given domain is to be found in our best scientific theories of that domain." This is why we believe, and rightly, in the reality of gravitational force, electromagnetic fields, and much more recently the Higgs boson. "To follow up by asking whether they are 'really' real would be to ask one question too many." Likewise it is, he says, with intentional agency -- the fact that some things happen because some human beings want to accomplish something, and have specific enumerable ideas about how those things can be accomplished -- we naturally regard intentional agency as existing because "our best theories in the human and...
I'm thinking today, for no good reason, about the "free will solution" to the problem of evil in theology. Practitioners of theodicy who rely on the free will solution maintain that evil must be attributed to the independent actions of human beings, supposed to have been endowed by God with freedom of the will. This by itself would not solve the problem. It only works as a solution if it can be shown that God has a Good Reason to allow human beings to be independent of His will. Then one can conclude that it is for a greater good that He allows us to allow evil into the world. This point was insisted upon by J.L. Mackie in what a much debated publication on this subject, his EVIL AND OMNIPOTENCE (1955). Theists, as Mackie understands them, must treat free will as a “third order good.” I'm not going to argue the underlying issues today. I have done that here before. I will confine this post, rather, to simply outlining those three orders of good. ...
Christian List, a professor of political science and philosophy at the London School of Economics, has a new book coming out from Harvard University Press entitled WHY FREE WILL IS REAL. It won't be available until May from HUP's promo page it looks good. Unlike the "compatibilists," List isn't redefining free will so that it means something unchallenging. He means by free will that there are in fact alternative possibilities. I might walk down Oak Street on the way home on a certain evening or I might walk down Oak Boulevard. The alternative nature of these possibilities is not simply a matter of our ignorance of the neurological workings of my mind before I start my walk. It is a natural fact about the world I inhabit, as I head down the street, that I could have instead gone down the boulevard. List's looks likely to be worth a read. I'm especially happy to observe that the HUP promo page includes a blurb from Robert Kane, my favorite con...
I hope every reader of mine has had a fine Thanksgiving break and is ready for another work week. In New England, the home of the origin story of this feast, we certainly had great weather for it: weather harsh enough that we could think of ourselves as new settlers in a harsh dangerous land and show some Calvinist fortitude in facing up to it! The following may have some connection to Calvinism, but not much. I'll inflict it upon you anyway. A young friend of mine, in college, taking a course on the philosophy of religion, was recently assigned to write a paper about the dispute between Mackie and Plantinga over free will and the problem of evil. Mackie has argued (as have many others, but the Mackie version of the case has become a focal point of recent debate) that it is logically impossible to reconcile three claims: that an omnipotent God exists; that this is also an ideally benevolent being; and that evil exists. Any theology with any hope of plausibility ...
In the comments section of a post I wrote many moons ago, I've been engaging in some back and forth with a reader, Marvin Edwards. Our discussion involved determinism and indeterminism in human action. I'm going to highlight the discussion here, because I think I put an important point quite well and am tired of patting myself on the back in private. "Christopher, if I am alone in a room with a bowl of a pples, and I'm feeling hungry, and I decide to go ahead and eat an apple, then I am the meaningful and relevant cause of the apple being eaten. Do any of the authors you mention suggest that it was 'some thing' other than me that caused the apple to be eaten?" Each of the four authors I had mentioned [James, Popper, Berlin, Kane] would agree with the following observations about eating apples. First, self-preservation is the deepest instinct, so of course we aren't free to get hungry or not to get hungry. In that sense, the matter is determin...
Now ... why, in the face of such arguments as that I quoted yesterday, am I an incompatibilist? Here's why: the argument simply misses the point. What William James, and Isaiah Berlin, and more recently Robert Kane (the author of the volume pictured above) have been saying is that moral judgments with regard to action X (whatever it is) will come to seem meaningless unless we presume that there was a genuine possibility that X would not occur. Take that woman in the restaurant. We see her look at the menu, we see her order a meal, and presume as empiricists that she has just made a choice. Is this a choice to which moral judgments apply? The naive but appealing answer is, "yes," or at least, "it might be." If you believe in animal rights you will think her decision morally better if she ordered tofu than if she ordered pork. Aside from that, consider the possibility that she has a medical condition (we need not specify/stipulate further) and she has ju...