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The contours of contemporary free will debatesIn Robert Kane (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, Oxford University Press. 2001.
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46Free WillProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 81 291-302. 2001.Over the past three decades, I have been developing a distinctive view of free will motivated by a desire to reconcile a non-determinist view of free will with modern science as well as with recent developments in philosophy. A view of free will of the kind I defend did not exist in a developed form before the 1980s, but is now discussed in the philosophical literature as one of three chief options an incompatibilist or libertarian view of free will might take. As such, this view has been the su…Read more
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193Responsibility, Luck, and ChanceJournal of Philosophy 96 (5): 217-240. 1999.Consider the following principle: (LP) If an action is undetermined at a time t, then its happening rather than not happening at t would be a matter of chance or luck, and so it could not be a free and responsible action. This principle (which we may call the luck principle, or simply LP) is false, as I shall explain shortly. Yet it seems true.
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Agency, responsibility, and indeterminism: Reflections on libertarian theories of free willIn Ted Honderich (ed.), Freedom and Determinism, Bradford Book/mit Press. 2004.
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44New directions on free willIn Robert H. Kane (ed.), The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Volume 2: Metaphysics, Bowling Green: Philosophy Doc Ctr. pp. 135-142. 1999.Libertarian or incompatibilist conceptions of free will (according to which free will is incompatible with determinism) have been under withering attack in the modern era of Western philosophy as obscure and unintelligible and have been dismissed as outdated by many twentieth century philosophers and scientists because of their supposed lack of fit with modern images of human beings in the natural and human sciences. In a recent book (The Significance of Free Will), I attempt to reconcile incomp…Read more
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178Introduction: The contours of contemporary free will debatesIn Robert Kane (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, Oxford University Press. 2001.
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21Free Will: A Defense Against Neurophysiological Determinism (review)Review of Metaphysics 36 (4): 948-950. 1983.This book defends a libertarian theory of freedom of will, requiring the incompatibility of free decisions and neurophysiological determinism. A revised version of a doctoral thesis presented at Oxford in 1976, it is written with uncommon fluency and contains more than a few ingenious arguments advancing the libertarian cause. In the end, the author must rely on a theory of agency, or agent causality, that is a trifle too obscure to convince most compatibilists. But this is a common problem amon…Read more
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4Response to Fischer, Pereboom, and VargasIn John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom & Manuel Vargas (eds.), Four Views on Free Will, Wiley-blackwell. 2007.
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159On the role of indeterminism in libertarian free willPhilosophical Explorations 19 (1): 2-16. 2016.In a recent paper in this journal, “How should libertarians conceive of the location and role of indeterminism?” Christopher Evan Franklin critically examines my libertarian view of free will and attempts to improve upon it. He says that while Kane's influential [view] offers many important advances in the development of a defensible libertarian theory of free will and moral responsibility … [he made] “two crucial mistakes in formulating libertarianism” – one about the location of indeterminism,…Read more
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545The Significance of Free WillOxford University Press USA. 1996.Robert Kane provides a critical overview of debates about free will of the past half century, relating this recent inquiry to the broader history of the free will issue and to vital currents of twentieth century thought. Kane also defends a traditional libertarian or incompatibilist view of free will, employing arguments that are both new to philosophy and that respond to contemporary developments in physics and biology, neuro science, and the cognitive and behavioral sciences.
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195The complex tapestry of free will: striving will, indeterminism and volitional streamsSynthese 196 (1): 145-160. 2019.The aim of this paper is to respond to recent discussion of, and objections to, the libertarian view of free will I have developed in many works over the past four decades. The issues discussed all have a bearing on the central question of how one might make sense of a traditional free will requiring indeterminism in the light of modern science. This task involves, among other things, avoiding all traditional libertarian appeals to unusual forms of agency or causation that cannot be accounted fo…Read more
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358Free will and responsibility: Ancient dispute, new themes (review)The Journal of Ethics 4 (4): 313-417. 2000.
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458_Some say there is no progress in philosophy, and certainly there is one sense in_ _which they are wrong. There are at least significant developments in philosophical_ _doctrines that have been persistently advocated in the past. With confidence I leave_ _you to arrive at a satisfactory understanding of 'significant'. There is no doubt that_ _Robert Kane has made some progress, probably more than any other contemporary_ _philosopher, in the laying out and defending of the doctrine that an unders…Read more
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37Deontic Acts, Frankfurt-Style Examples, and "'Ought' Implies 'Can'"The Journal of Ethics 4 (4): 357-360. 2000.
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213On free will, responsibility and indeterminism: Responses to Clarke, Haji, and MelePhilosophical Explorations 2 (2): 105-121. 1999.This paper responds to three critical essays on my book, The Significance of Free Will(Oxford, 1996) by Randolph Clarke, Istiyaque Haji and Alfred Mele (which essays appear in this issue and an earlier issue of this journal). This response first explains crucial features of the theory of free will of the book, including the notion of ultimate responsibility.The paper then answers objections of Haji and Mele that the occurrence of undetermined choices would be matters of luck or chance, and so co…Read more
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