Robert Kane

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 (one that insists upon the incompatibility of free will and determinism), 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.

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 for by ordinary modes of explanation familiar to the natural and human sciences. Doing this, I argue, requires piecing together a “complex tapestry” of ideas and arguments that involve rethinking many traditional assumptions about free will. The paper also argues that one cannot get to the heart of historical debates about free will without distinguishing different kinds of freedom, different senses of will, and different notions of control, among other distinctions. I especially focus here on different notions of freedom and control that are necessary to make sense of free will.

_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 understandable_ _freedom is importantly inconsistent with determinism, and that we do have this_ _freedom. If the past is any guide to the present, I myself, with the aid of further_ _study, will come to disagree. But certainly this summation of Kane's views, put_ _together for the Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website, is strongly_ _commended to you._.

This comprehensive reference provides an exhaustive guide to current scholarship on the perennial problem of Free Will--perhaps the most hotly and voluminously debated of all philosophical problems. While reference is made throughout to the contributions of major thinkers of the past, the emphasis is on recent research. The essays, most of which are previously unpublished, combine the work of established scholars with younger thinkers who are beginning to make significant contributions. Taken as a whole, the Handbook provides an engaging and accessible roadmap to the state of the art thinking on this enduring topic

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, the other about its role – “both of which have helped fan the flame of the luck argument”. In this paper, I respond to Franklin's criticisms, arguing that, so far from making it significantly more difficult to answer objections about luck and control, as he claims, giving indeterminism the location and role I do makes it possible to answer such objections and many other related objections to libertarian free will. A central theme of this paper will emerge in my responses: In order to make sense of freedom of will...

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 among libertarians and it may be a limitation in the theory they are defending, rather than a limitation in them. In any case, this is a book that anyone interested in the free will issue should read, and will read, with profit.

R. Jay Wallace’s Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments develops an original compatibilist approach to issues about moral responsibility and freedom that cannot be ignored by anyone working on these topics. Wallace’s theory is “Strawsonian” in the sense that it is heavily indebted to P. F. Strawson’s influential work on reactive attitudes. But we would seriously underestimate the originality of Wallace’s accomplishment if we said that his theory was merely an extension of Strawson’s. It includes new twists that Strawson did not envisage and removes some weaknesses in Strawson’s position that are clearly there. The Strawsonian approach is one of several new compatibilist approaches to responsibility and freedom that have changed the face of debates about these topics over the past four decades; and Wallace’s book is the most developed and challenging Strawsonian view available. I have reservations about some of Wallace’s conclusions, but I have nothing but admiration for the book. It develops an original position and is written with critical acumen and in a lucid style that could be shown to graduate students as a model of what good philosophical writing can be.

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 incompatibilist free will with new images of human beings emerging in the physical, biological, behavioral, cognitive, and neuro-sciences—avoiding the usual libertarian appeals to obscure or mysterious forms of agency or causation. In this paper, I extend that effort with special attention to the relation of libertarian free will to recent research on neural networks and cognition and to recent philosophical debates about freedom, control, rationality and responsibility

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 subject of much recent discussion. In this paper, I explain and defend my view of free will, and answer recent criticisms of it. Some of these criticisms are made by Robert Allen in his paper “Self-forming Actions,” a contribution to the seminar of which the present paper is a part. I also respond to Katherin Rogers’ contribution to this seminar “Libertarianism in Kane and Anselm.” Her book, Anselm on Freedom, argues that Anselm defended a unique libertarian view of free will, avoiding both Pelagianism and Augustine’s later compatibilism, a view that she argues has affinities to my view of free will. I also discuss these affinities to Anselm in my paper and their theological and well as philosophical implications.