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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Lately, the attitude of philosophers generally toward the free will issue has taken what I regard as an inauspicious turn. Where the predominant opinion had been that determinism and freedom were at harmony with one another, today it is incompatibilism which seems to prevail, and new voices raised in defense of libertarianism now offer their promise that problems once thought prohibitive to an acceptance of contra-causal freedom might be surmounted. I shall attempt to show that this recent rejection of compatibilism in fact rests on a mistake, and I shall suggest the outline of a solution to the free will issue which reconciles determinism and freedom.
We shall say that an event is nomologically necessary if and only if given a specified set of conditions (the initial conditions) and the actually existing laws of nature, the statement of that event could in principle be deduced as the conclusion of a valid deductive argument having the statement of initial conditions and the statement of the relevant law(s) as premises.
* Time for research on this and other topics was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
1 In his paper “An Empirical Disproof of Determinism?” (in Freedom and Determinism, ed. Lehrer, K. [New York: Random House, 1966). pp. 175–202)Google Scholar Keith Lehrer in an attempt to demonstrate that compatibilists cannot adopt a conditional analysis of free will spells this argument out in some detail.
2 As to psychological compulsion see my analysis of free choice on p. 512 and my discussions of Kleptomania on pp. 513–514.
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