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  1. Foreknowledge and causal determinism.John Martin Fischer - forthcoming - Theoria.
    I evaluate Patrick Todd's critique of the idea accepted by many, including (in contemporary philosophy) Nelson Pike and John Martin Fischer, that there can be non‐causal constraints on human actions (including basic actions). I suggest that Todd's critical reflections, although illuminating, are not persuasive. I defend non‐causal constraints in part by putting forward an interpretation of the intuitive idea of the fixity of the past following Carl Ginet: our freedom is the power to add to the given past.
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  • Incompatibilism and the garden of forking paths.Andrew Law - 2023 - Philosophical Issues 33 (1):110-123.
    Let (leeway) incompatibilism be the thesis that causal determinism is incompatible with the freedom to do otherwise. Several prominent authors have claimed that incompatibilism alone can capture, or at least best captures, the intuitive appeal behind Jorge Luis Borges's famous “Garden of Forking Paths” metaphor. The thought, briefly, is this: the “single path” leading up to one's present decision represents the past; the forking paths that one must decide between represent those possible futures consistent with the past and the laws (...)
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  • The Frankfurt-style cases: extinguishing the flickers of freedom.John Martin Fischer - 2022 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (9):1185-1209.
    ABSTRACT The Frankfurt-style Counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities have been controversial. I sketch some of the major moves in the debates surrounding the FSCs, and I seek to provide an answer to a big challenge: the indeterministic horn of the ‘dilemma defense’. Given indeterminism, it is unclear how Black can know with certainty what Jones will choose and do in the future; this leaves at least some open alternatives for Jones. I adopt the strategy of positing God in (...)
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  • Dependence and the Freedom to Do Otherwise.Taylor Cyr - forthcoming - Faith and Philosophy.
    An increasingly popular approach to reconciling divine foreknowledge with human freedom is to say that, because God’s beliefs depend on what we do, we are free to do otherwise than what we actually do despite God’s infallible foreknowledge. This paper develops a new challenge for this dependence response. The challenge stems from a case of backward time travel in which an agent intuitively lacks the freedom to do otherwise because of the time-traveler’s knowledge of what the agent will do, and (...)
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  • Lessons from Grandfather.Andrew Law & Ryan Wasserman - 2022 - Philosophies 7 (1):11.
    Assume that, even with a time machine, Tim does not have the ability to travel to the past and kill Grandfather. Why would that be? And what are the implications for traditional debates about freedom? We argue that there are at least two satisfactory explanations for why Tim cannot kill Grandfather. First, if an agent’s behavior at time _t_ is causally dependent on fact _F_, then the agent cannot perform an action (at _t_) that would require _F_ to have not (...)
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  • Freedom and the open future.Yishai Cohen - 2023 - Analytic Philosophy 64 (3):228-255.
    I draw upon Helen Steward's concept of agential settling to argue that freedom requires an ability to change the truth‐value of tenseless future contingents over time from false to true and that this ability requires a metaphysically open future.
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  • Molinism: Explaining our Freedom Away.Nevin Climenhaga & Daniel Rubio - 2022 - Mind 131 (522):459-485.
    Molinists hold that there are contingently true counterfactuals about what agents would do if put in specific circumstances, that God knows these prior to creation, and that God uses this knowledge in choosing how to create. In this essay we critique Molinism, arguing that if these theses were true, agents would not be free. Consider Eve’s sinning upon being tempted by a serpent. We argue that if Molinism is true, then there is some set of facts that fully explains both (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Independence Solution to the Problem of Theological Fatalism.Ryan Wasserman - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (1):66-77.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
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  • The Dependence Response and Explanatory Loops.Andrew Law - 2020 - Faith and Philosophy 37 (3):294-307.
    There is an old and powerful argument for the claim that divine foreknowledge is incompatible with the freedom to do otherwise. A recent response to this argument, sometimes called the “dependence response,” centers around the claim that God’s relevant past beliefs depend on the relevant agent’s current or future behavior in a certain way. This paper offers a new argument for the dependence response, one that revolves around different cases of time travel. Somewhat serendipitously, the argument also paves the way (...)
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  • Wiley-Blackwell: A Companion to Free Will.Joe Campbell, Kristin M. Mickelson & V. Alan White (eds.) - 2023 - Wiley.
    "We wish this volume to be a sure companion to the study of free will, broadly construed to include action theory, moral and legal responsibility, and cohort studies feathering off into adjacent fields in the liberal arts and sciences. In addition to general coverage of the discipline, this volume attempts a more challenging and complementary accompaniment to many familiar narratives about free will. In order to map out some directions such accompaniment will take, in this introduction we anchor the thirty (...)
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  • From the fixity of the past to the fixity of the independent.Andrew Law - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 178 (4):1301-1314.
    There is an old but powerful argument for the claim that exhaustive divine foreknowledge is incompatible with the freedom to do otherwise. A crucial ingredient in this argument is the principle of the “Fixity of the Past”. A seemingly new response to this argument has emerged, the so-called “dependence response,” which involves, among other things, abandoning FP for an alternative principle, the principle of the “Fixity of the Independent”. This paper presents three arguments for the claim that FI ought to (...)
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  • Freedom, Foreknowledge, and Dependence: A Dialectical Intervention.Taylor W. Cyr & Andrew Law - 2020 - American Philosophical Quarterly 57 (2):145-154.
    Recently, several authors have utilized the notion of dependence to respond to the traditional argument for the incompatibility of freedom and divine foreknowledge. However, proponents of this response have not always been so clear in specifying where the incompatibility argument goes wrong, which has led to some unfounded objections to the response. We remedy this dialectical confusion by clarifying both the dependence response itself and its interaction with the standard incompatibility argument. Once these clarifications are made, it becomes clear both (...)
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  • Atemporalism and dependence.Taylor W. Cyr - 2020 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 87 (2):149-164.
    It is widely thought that Atemporalism—the view that, because God is “outside” of time, he does not foreknow anything —constitutes a unique solution to the problem of freedom and foreknowledge. However, as I argue here, in order for Atemporalism to escape certain worries, the view must appeal to the dependence of God’s timeless knowledge on our actions. I then argue that, because it must appeal to such dependence, Atemporalism is crucially similar to the recent sempiternalist accounts proposed by Trenton Merricks, (...)
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  • Freedom, foreknowledge, and dependence.Ryan Wasserman - 2019 - Noûs 55 (3):603-622.
    The idea that some of God's past beliefs depend on our future actions has a long history, going back to Origen in the third century CE. However, it is not always clear what this idea amounts to, since it is not always clear what kind of dependence is at issue. This paper surveys five different interpretations of dependence and, in each case, considers the implications for the debate over theological fatalism. Along the way, we discuss a number of related issues, (...)
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  • Luckily, We Are Only Responsible for What We Could Have Avoided.Philip Swenson - 2019 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 43 (1):106-118.
    This paper has two goals: (1) to defend a particular response to the problem of resultant moral luck and (2) to defend the claim that we are only responsible for what we could have avoided. Cases of overdetermination threaten to undermine the claim that we are only responsible for what we could have avoided. To deal with this issue, I will motivate a particular way of responding to the problem of resultant moral luck. I defend the view that one's degree (...)
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  • (In)compatibilism.Kristin M. Mickelson - 2023 - In Joe Campbell, Kristin M. Mickelson & V. Alan White (eds.), Wiley-Blackwell: A Companion to Free Will. Wiley. pp. 58-83.
    The terms ‘compatibilism’ and ‘incompatibilism’ were introduced in the mid-20th century to name conflicting views about the logical relationship between the thesis of determinism and the thesis that someone has free will. These technical terms were originally introduced within a specific research paradigm, the classical analytic paradigm. This paradigm is now in its final stages of degeneration and few free-will theorists still work within it (i.e. using its methods, granting its substantive background assumptions, etc.). This chapter discusses how the ambiguity (...)
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  • Moral Responsibility Without General Ability.Taylor W. Cyr & Philip Swenson - 2019 - Philosophical Quarterly 69 (274):22-40.
    It is widely thought that, to be morally responsible for some action or omission, an agent must have had, at the very least, the general ability to do otherwise. As we argue, however, there are counterexamples to the claim that moral responsibility requires the general ability to do otherwise. We present several cases in which agents lack the general ability to do otherwise and yet are intuitively morally responsible for what they do, and we argue that such cases raise problems (...)
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  • Foreknowledge requires determinism.Patrick Todd - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (1):125-146.
    There is a longstanding argument that purports to show that divine foreknowledge is inconsistent with human freedom to do otherwise. Proponents of this argument, however, have for some time been met with the following reply: the argument posits what would have to be a mysterious non-causal constraint on freedom. In this paper, I argue that this objection is misguided – not because after all there can indeed be non-causal constraints on freedom (as in Pike, Fischer, and Hunt), but because the (...)
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  • Responsibility for Forgetting To Do.Thor Grünbaum - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (2):755-776.
    Assuming that an agent can be morally responsible for her forgetting to do something, we can use recent psychological research on prospective memory to assess the psychological assumptions made by normative accounts of the moral responsibility for forgetting. Two accounts of moral responsibility (control accounts and valuative accounts) have been prominent in recent debates about the degree to which agents are blameworthy for their unwitting omissions. This paper highlights the psychological assumptions concerning remembering and forgetting that characterise the accounts. The (...)
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  • Freedom in a Physical World.Andrew M. Bailey - 2020 - Philosophical Papers 49 (1):31-39.
    Making room for agency in a physical world is no easy task. Can it be done at all? In this article, I consider and reject an argument in the negative.
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  • (1 other version)Timelessness and freedom.Taylor W. Cyr - 2018 - Synthese:1-15.
    One way that philosophers have attempted to defend free will against the threat of fatalism and against the threat from divine beliefs has been to endorse timelessness views. In this paper, I argue that, in order to respond to general worries about fatalism and divine beliefs, timelessness views must appeal to the notion of dependence. Once they do this, however, their distinctive position as timelessness views becomes otiose, for the appeal to dependence, if it helps at all, would itself be (...)
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  • Two Kinds of Soft Facts.Ciro De Florio & Aldo Frigerio - 2018 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 95 (1):34-53.
    The concept of soft facts is crucial for the Ockhamistic analysis of the divine knowledge of future contingents; moreover, this notion is important in itself because it concerns the structure of the facts that depend—in some sense—on other future facts. However, the debate on soft facts is often flawed by the unaware use of two different notions of soft facts. The facts of the first kind are supervenient on temporal facts: By bringing about a temporal fact, the agent can bring (...)
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  • Free Will, Foreknowledge, and Future‐Dependent Beliefs.Raphael van Riel - 2017 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 55 (4):500-520.
    Recently, a time-honored assumption has resurfaced in some parts of the free will debate: if past divine beliefs or past truths about what we do depend on what we do, then these beliefs and truths are, in a sense, up to us; hence, we are able to act otherwise, despite the existence of past truths or past divine beliefs about our future actions. In this paper, I introduce and discuss a novel incompatibilist argument that rests on. This argument is interesting (...)
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  • Fischer on Foreknowledge and Explanatory Dependence.Philip Swenson - 2017 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 9 (4):51-61.
    I explore several issues raised in John Martin Fischer’s Our Fate: Essays on God and Free Will. First I discuss whether an approach to the problem of freedom and foreknowledge that appeals directly to the claim that God’s beliefs depend on the future is importantly different from Ockhamism. I suggest that this dependence approach has advantages over Ockhamism. I also argue that this approach gives us good reason to reject the claim that the past is fixed. Finally, I discuss Fischer’s (...)
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  • Foreknowledge and Free Will.Linda Zagzebski - 2011 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:online.
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  • (1 other version)The Independence Solution to the Problem of Theological Fatalism.Ryan Wasserman - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (1):66-77.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 1, Page 66-77, January 2022.
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  • Presentism, Actualism, and Fatalism.Bradley Rettler - 2023 - Metaphysics 6 (1):13-23.
    In recent papers, Philip Swenson (2016) has argued that presentism is incompatible with the conjunction of libertarianism and divine foreknowledge, and Michael Rea (2006) has argued that presentism is incompatible with the conjunction of libertarianism and bivalence. In this paper, I respond to Swenson’s and Rea’s arguments. In each case, I develop a parody argument that seeks to show that actualism -- the view that everything is actual -- is inconsistent with the conjunction of (in the case of Rea) libertarianism (...)
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  • Free Will and Two Local Determinisms.Andrew Law & Neal A. Tognazzini - 2019 - Erkenntnis 84 (5):1011-1023.
    Hudson has formulated two local deterministic theses and argued that both are incompatible with freedom. We argue that Hudson has half the story right. Moreover, reflection on Hudson’s theses brings out an important point for debates about freedom generally: that instead of focusing on the notion of entailment, debates about freedom should focus on the notions of explanation and sourcehood. Hudson’s theses provide an excellent case study for why the latter notions ought to take precedence over the former in debates (...)
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  • Counterfactual power and genuine choice.Adrian Kuźniar - forthcoming - Theoria.
    The article introduces a distinction between weak and strong counterfactual power and shows that as far as the metaphysical aspect of choice is concerned, T. Merricks's examples do not undermine the proposition that strong counterfactual power over a fact suffices for having a genuine choice about that fact. This is relevant to debates about logical fatalism, theological incompatibilism and nomological (determinism) incompatibilism. If strong counterfactual power is sufficient for having a choice, then in each of the main arguments for the (...)
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  • Contra Tooley: Divine Foreknowledge is Possible.Elijah Hess - 2020 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 87 (2):165-172.
    Michael Tooley’s latest argument against the possibility of divine foreknowledge trades on the idea that, whichever theory of time is true, the ontology of the future—or lack thereof—gives rise to special problems for God’s prescience. I argue that Tooley’s reasoning is predicated on two mischaracterizations and conclude that, on at least some theories of time, the possibility of divine foreknowledge appears secure.
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  • Replies to my Critics.John Martin Fischer - 2017 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 9 (4):63-85.
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  • (1 other version)Timelessness and freedom.Taylor W. Cyr - 2020 - Synthese 197 (10):4439-4453.
    One way that philosophers have attempted to defend free will against the threat of fatalism and against the threat from divine beliefs has been to endorse timelessness views (about propositions and God’s beliefs, respectively). In this paper, I argue that, in order to respond to general worries about fatalism and divine beliefs, timelessness views must appeal to the notion of dependence. Once they do this, however, their distinctive position as timelessness views becomes otiose, for the appeal to dependence, if it (...)
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