Robert Kane

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 The essays, most of which are previously unpublished, combine the work of established scholars with younger thinkers who are beginning to make significant contributions.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