Kane Abstract

Can a Traditional Incompatibilist or Libertarian Free Will Be Made Consistent With Modern Science? Steps Toward a Positive Answer

I started thinking about free will [in the late 1960s] when my philosophical mentor at the time, Wilfrid Sellars, a well-known analytic philosopher of the period, challenged me to reconcile a traditional incompatibilist or libertarian free will with modern science. Sellars was a scientifically oriented thinker and he was a compatibilist about free will, like the vast majority of philosophers and scientists of that era. He did not believe a traditional (libertarian) free will—one that was incompatible with determinism —could be accounted for without appealing to obscure or mysterious forms of agency of the kinds P. F. Strawson had dubbed "pan icky metaphysics"—that is, without appealing to un-caused causes, immaterial minds, noumenal selves, non-event agent causes, prime movers unmoved, and the like.

I accepted his challenge at the time [of reconciling free will with science without any such problematic appeals] and remember thinking with the brashness and naivete of youth: "Give me three or four weeks and I'll wrap this up and be back with an answer (or at least by the end of the semester!)." Well, it is now more than forty years later and the effort is still ongoing. The reason the task was so much more difficult than I naively assumed as a young student was that, as I slowly came to realize, it required rethinking many facets of the traditional problem of free will from the ground up, breaking old molds of thought and substituting new ones. I report on some results of this life-long rethinking of an age-old problem in this paper.