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The mystery of metaphysical freedom

In Peter van Inwagen (ed.), Van Inwagen, P.; Zimmerman, D. Metaphysics: The Big Questions. pp. 365-373 (1998)

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  1. The folk psychology of free will: Fits and starts.Shaun Nichols - 2004 - Mind and Language 19 (5):473-502.
    According to agent-causal accounts of free will, agents have the capacity to cause actions, and for a given action, an agent could have done otherwise. This paper uses existing results and presents experimental evidence to argue that young children deploy a notion of agent-causation. If young children do have such a notion, however, it remains quite unclear how they acquire it. Several possible acquisition stories are canvassed, including the possibility that the notion of agent-causation develops from a prior notion of (...)
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  • Metaphysics.Peter Van Inwagen, Meghan Sullivan & Sara Bernstein - 2023 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Thomist Libertarianism is Committed to Mysterianism.Armand Babakhanian - forthcoming - New Blackfriars.
    In recent years, a large amount of scholarship has been written about St Thomas Aquinas's views on free will and determinism. This paper is an attempt to bring some Thomist views of libertarian free will into dialogue with analytic philosopher Peter van Inwagen and his ‘mysterianism’ about free will. The thesis of this paper is that Thomist libertarians about free will are committed to Peter van Inwagen's mysterianism about free will. The paper intends to accomplish this aim by showing how (...)
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  • Metaphysical Compatibilism and the Ontology of Trans-World Personhood: A Neo-Lewisian Argument for the Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge (Determinism) and Metaphysical Free Will.Bartlomiej Andrzej Lenart - 2022 - Metaphysica 23 (2):385-407.
    David Lewis’ contemplations regarding divine foreknowledge and free will, along with some of his other more substantial work on modal realism and his counterpart theory can serve as a springboard to a novel solution to the foreknowledge and metaphysical freedom puzzle, namely a proposal that genuine metaphysical freedom is compatible with determinism, which is quite different from the usual compatibilist focus on the compatibility between determinism and moral responsibility. This paper argues that while Lewis opens the doors to such a (...)
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  • Free Will for the Long Run.Benjamin I. Huff - 2021 - The Monist 104 (3):352-365.
    For beings that have a beginning in time, free will seems impossible, because our choices seem to be a result of past events over which we had no control. Latter-day Saint theology offers what seems a simple solution: the idea that human beings have always existed in the form of spirits or “intelligences.” While this idea solves some key puzzles, contemplating an infinite past also brings the recognition that causal autonomy is not enough for freedom. A crucial feature of humanity (...)
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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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  • Rolling back the Rollback Argument.László Bernáth & János Tőzsér - 2020 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 2 (39):43-61.
    By means of the Rollback Argument, this paper argues that metaphysically robust probabilities are incompatible with a kind of control which can ensure that free actions are not a matter of chance. Our main objection to those (typically agent-causal) theories which both attribute a kind of control to agents that eliminates the role of chance concerning free actions and ascribe probabilities to options of decisions is that metaphysically robust probabilities should be posited only if they can have a metaphysical explanatory (...)
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  • On Freedom’s Mystery.Rene van Woudenberg - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (4):1629-1638.
    This paper argues that Peter van Inwagen’s argument for the mysteriousness of metaphysical freedom does not establish its conclusion. Van Inwagen’s argument involves the notion of ‘chance’. This paper explores how Van Inwagen’s argument fares when the notion of chance is unpacked in four different ways and two different semantics for conditionals are applied. This paper concludes that the mystery argument fails to establish that freedom is a mystery in each of its forms.
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  • The indispensability of the manifest image.Mario De Caro - 2020 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 46 (2):162-172.
    It is very contentious whether the features of the manifest image have a place in the world as it is described by natural science. For the advocates of strict naturalism, this is a serious problem, which has been labelled ‘placement problem’. In this light, some of them try to show that those features are reducible to scientifically acceptable ones. Others, instead, argue that the features of the manifest image are mere illusions and, consequently, have to be eliminated from our ontology. (...)
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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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  • Der metaphysische Begriff der Willensfreiheit und das Transferprinzip des Keine-Wahl-Habens.Godehard Brüntrup - 2000 - In Dirk Greiman & Constanze Peres (eds.), Wahrheit - Sein - Struktur. Auseinandersetzungen mit Metaphysik. New York: Georg Olms. pp. 102-120.
    Article on the problem of free will and determinism. A defense of the so-called "consequence argument" arguing that free will and determinism are incompatible.
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  • Meta-epistemological Scepticism: Criticisms and a Defence.Chris Ranalli - 2015 - Dissertation, University of Edinburgh
    The epistemological problem of the external world asks: (1) “How is knowledge of the external world possible given certain obstacles which make it look impossible?” This is a “how-possible?” question: it asks how something is possible given certain obstacles which make it look impossible (cf. Cassam 2007; Nozick 1981; Stroud 1984). Now consider the following question, which asks: (2) “How is a philosophically satisfying answer to (1) possible?” Skepticism is the thesis that knowledge of the external world is impossible. It (...)
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  • Mysterianism and Skepticism.Mario De Caro - 2009 - Iris. European Journal of Philosophy and Public Debate 1 (2):449-458.
    The article discusses the proposals for replying to the skeptical challenge developed by the so-called Neo-mysterians, and more particularly by the most eloquent of them, Colin McGinn. McGinn’s version of mysterianism, which he labels “Transcendental Naturalism,” is a very candid and rigorous form of scientific naturalism since (contrary to the standard naturalistic views) it is prepared to concede both that the attempts to reduce philosophically controversial phenomena – such as knowledge, free will, consciousness, meaning and the self – do not (...)
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  • Creator/Creatures Relation.David B. Burrell - 2008 - Faith and Philosophy 25 (2):177-189.
    Can philosophical inquiry into divinity be authentic to its subject, God, without adapting its categories to the challenges of its scriptural inspiration, be that biblical or Quranic? This essay argues that it cannot, and that the adaptation, while it can be articulated in semantic terms, must rather amount to a transformation of standard philosophical strategies. Indeed, without such a radical transformation, “philosophy of religion” will inevitably mislead us into speaking of a “god” rather than our intended object.
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  • Arguments for incompatibilism.Kadri Vihvelin - 2003/2017 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Determinism is a claim about the laws of nature: very roughly, it is the claim that everything that happens is determined by antecedent conditions together with the natural laws. Incompatibilism is a philosophical thesis about the relevance of determinism to free will: that the truth of determinism rules out the existence of free will. The incompatibilist believes that if determinism turned out to be true, it would also be true that we don't have, and have never had, free will. The (...)
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  • Free will, chance, and mystery.Laura Ekstrom - 2003 - Philosophical Studies 113 (2):153-80.
    This paper proposes a reconciliation between libertarian freedomand causal indeterminism, without relying on agent-causation asa primitive notion. I closely examine Peter van Inwagen''s recentcase for free will mysterianism, which is based in part on thewidespread worry that undetermined acts are too chancy to befree. I distinguish three senses of the term chance I thenargue that van Inwagen''s case for free will mystrianism fails,since there is no single construal of the term change on whichall of the premises of his argument for (...)
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  • Political Myths in Plato and Asimov.Nathaniel Goldberg - 2019 - Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy 2:1-19.
    Works of science fiction tend to describe hypothetical futures, or counterfactual pasts or presents, to entertain their readers. Philosophical thought experiments tend to describe counterfactual situations to test their readers’ philosophical intuitions. Indeed, works of science fiction can sometimes be read as containing thought experiments. I compare one especially famous thought experiment from Plato’s Republic with what I read as two thought experiments from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. All three thought experiments concern myths used in political contexts, and comparing them (...)
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  • (1 other version)Moral Responsibility, Justice, and Freedom.Jonathan Smith - 2020 - Quaerens Deum: The Liberty Undergraduate Journal for Philosophy of Religion 5 (1).
    Freedom, and in particular, the freedom of human beings, is a hot topic within the field of metaphysics. In this paper, instead of arguing for the truth of a particular position on freedom, I explore whether a particular position, compatibilism, might be consistent with the existence of moral responsibility and retributive justice. To alleviate ambiguity, I construct a model by which the four primary positions on freedom might be clearly understood. I then distinguish between what I call ‘common-sense’ views of (...)
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  • Psychological Closure Does Not Entail Cognitive Closure.Michael Vlerick & Maarten Boudry - 2017 - Dialectica 71 (1):101-115.
    According to some philosophers, we are “cognitively closed” to the answers to certain problems. McGinn has taken the next step and offered a list of examples: the mind/body problem, the problem of the self and the problem of free will. There are naturalistic, scientific answers to these problems, he argues, but we cannot reach them because of our cognitive limitations. In this paper, we take issue with McGinn's thesis as the most well-developed and systematic one among the so-called “new mysterians”. (...)
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  • Agent-Causation and Paradigms for God’s Knowledge.Christina Schneider - 2013 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 5 (1):35--54.
    The article aims at formulating a philosophical framework and by this giving some means at hand to save human libertarian freedom, God’s omniscience and God’s ”eternity’. This threefold aim is achieved by 1) conceiving of an agent as having different possibilities to act, 2) regarding God’s knowledge -- with respect to agents -- not only as being ”propositional’ in character but also as being ”experiential’: God knows an agent also from the ”first person perspective’, as the agent knows herself, and, (...)
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  • Free will and mystery: looking past the Mind Argument.Seth Shabo - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 162 (2):291-307.
    Among challenges to libertarians, the _Mind_ Argument has loomed large. Believing that this challenge cannot be met, Peter van Inwagen, a libertarian, concludes that free will is a mystery. Recently, the _Mind_ Argument has drawn a number of criticisms. Here I seek to add to its woes. Quite apart from its other problems, I argue, the _Mind_ Argument does a poor job of isolating the important concern for libertarians that it raises. Once this concern has been clarified, however, another argument (...)
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  • New Essays on the Metaphysics of Moral Responsibility.Joseph Keim Campbell - 2008 - The Journal of Ethics 12 (3-4):193 - 201.
    This is the introduction to a volume of new essays in the metaphysics of moral responsibility by John Martin Fischer, Carl Ginet, Ishtiyaque Haji, Alfred R. Mele, Derk Pereboom, Paul Russell, and Peter van Inwagen. I provide some background for the essays, cover the main debates in the metaphysics of moral responsibility, and emphasize some of the authors' contributions to this area of philosophy.
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  • The Consequence Argument and the Definition of Determinism.Christopher Hughes - 2015 - Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 71 (4):705-724.
    Resumo Peter van Inwagen no seu An Essay of Free Will e, no muito mais tarde, “The Consequence Argument” formula várias versões daquilo que designou por “o argumento de consequência”. van Inwagen descreveu o “argumento da consequência” como um argumento para a incompatibilidade do determinismo com o livre arbítrio. Contudo, o autor deste artigo argumenta que a mais recente formulação do argumento da consequência não é, tal como está, um argumento para a incompatibilidade do determinismo com o livre arbítrio. Embora (...)
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  • (1 other version)Libertad de la voluntad y poderes causales.José Tomás Alvarado Marambio - 2012 - Veritas: Revista de Filosofía y Teología 26:107-123.
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  • Functionalism without physicalism: Outline of an emergentist program.Robert C. Koons - 2003 - Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design 2 (3-3).
    The historical association between functionalism and physicalism is not an unbreakable one. There are reasons for finding some version of a functional account of the mental attractive that are independent of the plausibility of physicalism. I develop a non-physicalist version of func- tionalism and explain how this model is able to secure genuine emergence of the mental, despite Kim’s arguments that such emergence theories are incoherent. The kind of teleological emergence of the mental required by this model is in fact (...)
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