MindPapers: 5.4d. Free Will, Misc

Forman, David (2008). Free Will and the Freedom of the Sage in Leibniz and the Stoics. The History of Philosophy Quarterly 25 (3):203-219. (Google | More links)

Forman, David (2007). Review of Ermanno Bencivenga, Ethics Vindicated: Kant's Transcendental Legitimation of Moral Discourse. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (6). (Google)

Greenspan, Patricia (ms). Philosophy of action: 5 questions. (Google)

Abstract: Like many people, I was initially attracted to free will issues – at first embracing hard determinism, as part of a general rejection of doctrines associated with religion, though exposure to Kant’s views in my first philosophy course made me begin to consider nonreligious grounds for an indeterminist conception of free action. Of course, Kant also takes belief in God and immortality as presupposed by moral agency, but I was never much moved by those arguments. On free will, though, I thought seeing my acts as determined would give me a reason to expend less effort on them

Greenspan, Patricia (1987). Unfreedom and Responsibility. In F. Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions: New Essays in Moral Psychology. (Google)

Harrison, Bernard (2003). Review: The human world in the physical universe: Consciousness, free will, and evolution. Mind 112 (448). (Google)

Hasker, William (2003). Is free-will theism religiously inadequate? A reply to Ciocchi. Religious Studies 39 (4):431-440. (Google)

Abstract: David Ciocchi has charged that ‘open’ or free-will theism is religiously inadequate. This is it is because it is unable to affirm the ‘presumption of divine intervention in response to petitionary prayer’ (PDI), a presumption Ciocchi claims is implicit in the religious practice of ordinary Christian believers. I argue that PDI and Ciocchi's other assumptions concerning prayer are too strong, and would upon reflection be rejected by most believers. On the other hand, God as conceived by free-will theism has extensive resources for answering petitionary prayers, including prayers whose fulfilment depends on the free responses of other persons

Kane, Robert, A contemporary introduction to free will. (Google)

Abstract: A common thought regarding free will: “We feel…it is ‘up to us’ what we choose and how we act; and this means [a] we could have chosen or acted otherwise…[and] [b] the ultimate sources of our actions lie in us and not outside us in factors beyond our control” (6)

LaFollette, Hugh (1980). Plantinga on the free will defense. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11 (2). (Google | More links)

Abstract: International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Spring, 1980, 123-32

Levi, Don (2008). Did God deprive pharaoh of free will? Philosophy and Literature 32 (1):pp. 58-73. (Google)

Mawson, T. J. (2005). Freedom, human and divine. Religious Studies 41 (1):55-69. (Google)

Abstract: In this paper I seek to show how God's freedom is not reduced or His power diminished by His inability to be less than perfectly good even though ours would be. That ours would be explains why it might prima facie appear to us that there is a ‘conceptual tension’ between some of the claims of traditional theism and reveals some interesting (well, to me anyway) differences between human freedom and divine freedom

Mele, Alfred R. (2002). Autonomy, self-control and weakness of will. In Robert H. Kane (ed.), The Oxford Handbook on Free Will. Oxford University Press. (Cited by 3 | Google)

Mele, Alfred R. (1986). Is akratic action unfree? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 46 (4):673-679. (Google | More links)

Abstract: That incontinent action is possible, I have argued elsewhere. The purpose of the present paper is to ascertain whether such action can ever be free.

Merricks, Trenton (2009). Truth and freedom. Philosophical Review 118 (1). (Google)

Abstract: is just a few moments from now. And suppose that the proposition that Jones sits at t was true a thousand years ago. Does the thousand-years-ago truth of that proposition imply that Jones's upcoming sitting at t will not be free? This article argues that it does not. It also argues that Jones even now has a choice about the thousand-years-ago truth of that Jones sits at t . Those arguments do not require the complex machinery of Ockhamism, with its distinction between hard facts and soft facts; indeed, those arguments do not require any complex machinery at all. Instead, those arguments are built on an uncontroversial understanding of the idea that truth depends on the world. In the final section of the article, those arguments are extended to show that foreknowledge of an action does not threaten that action's freedom

Nelkin, Dana K. (2004). The sense of freedom. In Freedom and Determinism. Cambridge MA: Bradford Book/MIT Press. (Cited by 6 | Google)

O'Connor, David (1996). A reformed problem of evil and the free will defense. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 39 (1). (Google)

Pruss, Alexander (2003). A new free-will defence. Religious Studies 39 (2):211-223. (Google | More links)

Abstract: This paper argues that if creatures are to have significant free will, then God's essential omni-benevolence and essential omnipotence cannot logically preclude Him from creating a world containing a moral evil. The paper maintains that this traditional conclusion does not need to rest on reliance on subjunctive conditionals of free will. It can be grounded in several independent ways based on premises that many will accept

Scanlon, T. M. (1988). The Significance of Choice. In Sterling M. McMurrin (ed.), The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (Vol. 8, pp. 149-216). University of Utah Press. (Google)

Schlosser, Markus E. (2008). Review of "Freedom and neurobiology: Reflections on free will, language, and political power", by John R. Searle. Mind 117 (468):1127-30. (Google)

Schlosser, Markus E. (2010). Review of "Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem", by Mark Balaguer. Metapsychology Online 14 (16). (Google)

Stump, Eleonore (1983). Knowledge, freedom and the problem of evil. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 14 (1). (Google)

Watson, Gary (2004). Agency and Answerability: Selected Essays. Oxford University Press. (Google)

Abstract: Since the 1970s Gary Watson has published a series of brilliant and highly influential essays on human action, examining such questions as: in what ways are we free and not free, rational and irrational, responsible or not for what we do? Moral philosophers and philosophers of action will welcome this collection, representing one of the most important bodies of work in the field

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