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  1. Motivational determinism.Eric Christian Barnes - 2023 - Analytic Philosophy 64 (3):211-227.
    Physical determinism is a metaphysical thesis about the natural world whose consequences for freedom and moral responsibility have been widely discussed. In this paper, I articulate a different form of determinism, motivational determinism, which claims that all intentional action is causally determined by the prior motivational state of the agent. Motivational determinism was defended in a simple form by Hume, but has been neglected in recent philosophical literature. I show that there are important reasons that support the plausibility of MD. (...)
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  • The Block Universe: A Philosophical Investigation in Four Dimensions.Pieter Thyssen - 2020 - Dissertation, Ku Leuven
    The aim of this doctoral dissertation is to closely explore the nature of Einstein’s block universe and to tease out its implications for the nature of time and human freedom. Four questions, in particular, are central to this dissertation, and set out the four dimensions of this philosophical investigation: (1) Does the block universe view of time follow inevitably from the theory of special relativity? (2) Is there room for the passage of time in the block universe? (3) Can we (...)
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  • Free Will, Temporal Asymmetry, and Computational Undecidability.Stuart T. Doyle - 2022 - Journal of Mind and Behavior 43 (4):305-321.
    One of the central criteria for free will is “Could I have done otherwise?” But because of a temporal asymmetry in human choice, the question makes no sense. The question is backward-looking, while human choices are forward-looking. At the time when any choice is actually made, there is as of yet no action to do otherwise. Expectation is the only thing to contradict (do other than). So the ability to do something not expected by the ultimate expecter, Laplace’s demon, is (...)
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  • Free Will of an Ontologically Open Mind.Jan Scheffel - manuscript
    The problem of free will has persistently resisted a solution throughout centuries. There is reason to believe that new elements need to be introduced into the analysis in order to make progress. In the present physicalist approach, these elements are emergence and information theory in relation to universal limits set by quantum physics. Furthermore the common, but vague, characterization of free will as "being able to act differently" is, in the spirit of Carnap, rephrased into an explicatum more suitable for (...)
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  • The naturalistic case for free will.Christian List - 2022 - In Meir Hemmo, Stavros Ioannidis, Orly Shenker & Gal Vishne (eds.), Levels of Reality in Science and Philosophy: Re-Examining the Multi-Level Structure of Reality. Springer.
    The aim of this expository paper is to give an informal overview of a plausible naturalistic case for free will. I will describe what I take to be the main naturalistically motivated challenges for free will and respond to them by presenting an indispensability argument for free will. The argument supports the reality of free will as an emergent higher-level phenomenon. I will also explain why the resulting picture of free will does not conflict with the possibility that the fundamental (...)
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  • Consciousness and Mind.Carolyn Dicey Jennings - forthcoming - In Marcus Rossberg (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Analytic Philosophy. Cambridge University Press.
    Some of the oldest and deepest questions in philosophy fall under the umbrella of consciousness and mind: What is the mind and how is it related to the body? What provides our thoughts with content? How is consciousness related to the natural world? Do we have distinctive causal powers? Analytic philosophers have made significant progress on these and related problems in the last century. Given the high volume of work on such topics, this chapter is necessarily selective. It offers major (...)
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  • Ciceronov de fato: o helenističkim kondicionalima i slobodi volje.Vladimir Marko - 2023 - Novi Sad: Futura publikacije.
    Cicero's De fato: On Hellenistic Conditionals and Free Will. The Serbo-Croatian translation of Cicero's De fato, with comments and detailed analysis of some arguments and problems of the text. -/- (s/h): Tekst Ciceronovog spisa "de fato", prevod, komentari i u dodacima, detaljnija analiza pojedinih argumenata i problema sadržanih u tekstu.
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  • Against Accomplice Liability.Alex Kaiserman - 2011 - In Leslie Green & Brian Leiter (eds.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 124-155.
    Accomplice liability makes people guilty of crimes they knowingly helped or encouraged others to commit, even if they did not commit the crime themselves. But this method of criminalizing aiders and abettors is fraught with problems. In this chapter, I argue that accomplice liability in the criminal law should be replaced with a system in which agents are criminalized on the basis of their individual contributions to causings of harm—the larger the contribution, the more severe the crime—regardless of whether those (...)
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  • Emergent Will.Jan Scheffel - manuscript
    The enduring problem of free will has defied resolution across centuries. There is reason to believe that novel factors must be integrated into the analysis to make progress. Within the current physicalist framework, these factors encompass emergence and information theory, in the context of constraints imposed by physical limits on the representation of information. Furthermore the common, but vague, characterization of free will as 'being able to act differently' is rephrased into an explicatum more suitable for formal analysis. It is (...)
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  • Agential Possibilities.Christian List - 2023 - Possibility Studies and Society.
    We ordinarily think that we human beings have agency: we have control over our choices and make a difference to our environments. Yet it is not obvious how agency can fit into a physical world that is governed by exceptionless laws of nature. In particular, it is unclear how agency is possible if those laws are deterministic and the universe functions like a mechanical clockwork. In this short paper, I first explain the apparent conflict between agency and physical determinism (referring (...)
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  • A hermeneutical back-and-forth between different approaches to agency.Caroline Stankozi - 2023 - Spontaneous Generations 11 (1):1-13.
    Agency can be approached from the human case (anthropogenically) or coming from life in general, with organisms like bacteria in mind (biogenically). Each perspective is biased: the former approach tends to set the bar for agency very high, while the latter invites very liberal attributions of agency. Such a polarisation is epistemically flawed. As a rectification, this paper calls for a hermeneutical back-and-forth between opposite approaches to agency – reducing excessive restrictiveness or permissiveness and combining the unique explanatory strengths of (...)
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  • Resolving teleology's false dilemma.Gunnar Babcock & Dan McShea - 2023 - Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 139 (4):415-432.
    This paper argues that the account of teleology previously proposed by the authors is consistent with the physical determinism that is implicit across many of the sciences. We suggest that much of the current aversion to teleological thinking found in the sciences is rooted in debates that can be traced back to ancient natural science, which pitted mechanistic and deterministic theories against teleological ones. These debates saw a deterministic world as one where freedom and agency is impossible. And, because teleological (...)
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  • Chancy Covariance and The Mind-Body Problem.Benjamin Eva - 2022 - Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind 2:177-216.
    Most agree that mental properties depend in some way on physical properties. While phys- icalists describe this dependence in terms of deterministic synchronic relations like identity or supervenience, some dualists prefer to think of it in terms of indeterministic dynamic relations, like causation. I’m going to develop a third conception of the dependence of the mental on the physical that falls somewhere between the deterministic synchronic dependence relations of the physicalist and the indeterministic diachronic dependence relations advocated by some dualists. (...)
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  • A Critique of Compatibilist-Libertarianism.Zachary Peck - unknown
    Christian List has recently defended what he refers to as a compatibilist-libertarian theory of free will. He attempts to satisfy the libertarian requirement for alternative possibilities without assuming the falsity of physical determinism. To do so, List relies on a multi-level modal theory that he developed with Marcus Pivato. In this theory, List and Pivato demonstrate the compatibility of physical determinism and agential indeterminism. The success of compatibilist-libertarianism essentially hinges upon whether or not List and Pivato’s theory is truly consistent (...)
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  • Gender.Holly Lawford-Smith & Michael Hauskeller - 2022 - In Michael Hauskeller (ed.), The Things That Really Matter: Philosophical Conversations on the Cornerstones of Life. London: UCL Press. pp. 65-83.
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  • Freedom to do Otherwise and the Contingency of the Laws of Nature.Jeff Mitchell - manuscript
    This article argues that the freedom of voluntary action can be grounded in the contingency of the laws of nature. That is, the possibility of doing otherwise is equivalent to the possibility of the laws being otherwise. This equivalence can be understood in terms of an agent drawing a boundary between self and not-self in the domains of both matter and laws, defining the extent of the body and of voluntary behaviour. In particular, the article proposes that we can think (...)
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  • Freedom and chance.Mark Wulff Carstensen - unknown
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  • No Fixed past : A Compatibilist Reply to the Consequence Argument.Elin Wengelin Grantén - unknown
    Carl Hoeferʼs “freedom from the inside out” is a compatibilist account of freedom that claims that we can have a robust kind of freedom even if the world is deterministic. The key insight is that determinism belongs in tenseless B-series time in the block universe, not in our everyday notions of the world where time is experienced in a tensed way with a past, a present, and a future, where the past is viewed as fixed and the future as open. (...)
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  • Can Physics Make Us Free?Tuomas K. Pernu - 2017 - Frontiers in Physics 5.
    A thoroughly physical view on reality and our common sense view on agency and free will seem to be in a direct conflict with each other: if everything that happens is determined by prior physical events, so too are all our actions and conscious decisions; you have no choice but to do what you are destined to do. Although this way of thinking has intuitive appeal, and a long history, it has recently began to gain critical attention. A number of (...)
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  • Free Will and the Cross-Level Consequence Argument.Jonathan Birch - 2020
    Christian List has recently constructed a novel formal framework for representing the relationship between free will and determinism. At its core is a distinction between physical and agential levels of description. List has argued that, since the consequence argument cannot be reconstructed within this framework, the consequence argument rests on a ‘category mistake’: an illicit conflation of the physical and agential levels. I show that an expanded version of List’s framework allows the construction of a cross-level consequence argument.
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