Precis of The Significance of Free Will

Abstract

The first of two aims of this book is to provide a critical overview of debates about free will of past half century, relating recent debates to broader history of free will issue and to other currents of twentieth-century thought. The second aim is to defend a traditional incompatibilist or libertarian view of free will in ways that respond to twentieth century developments in sciences and philosophy. Free will, as I understand it, is the power of agents to be ultimate creators and sustainers of their own ends or purposes (p. 4). I argue in chapters 1 and 3 that this is traditional idea of free will that has been in dispute for centuries and has been under attack in modern era as an obscure and outdated notion that no longer fits with current images of human beings in sciences and philosophy. The book focuses on four questions that have been brought to forefront by these modern attacks on free will: (1) The Compatibility Question (Is freedom compatible with determinism ?), (2) Significance Question (What kind of free will is worth wanting?), (3) Intelligibility Question (Can we make sense of an incompatibilist free will, or is it essentially mysterious or obscure? and (4) Existence Question (Can such a free will exist in natural order and, if so, where?). Throughout this century, lion's share of debate has been on Compatibility Question, with some, but less, attention given to other three questions. I try to right imbalance in this book by giving in-depth treatment to all four questions (Compatibility and Significance in Part I, Intelligibility and Existence in Part II). Moreover, I attempt to point current debates in new directions on all four questions. On Compatibility Question, most recent and past debate has focused on question of whether determinism is compatible with the condition of alternative possibilities (AP)-the requirement that free agent could have done otherwise. Arguments about AP have reached new levels of sophistication in recent decades, with new incompatibilist attempts to show