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Supervenient Freedom and the Free Will Deadlock Cover

Supervenient Freedom and the Free Will Deadlock

Open Access
|Mar 2018

Abstract

Supervenient libertarianism maintains that indeterminism may exist at a supervening agency level, consistent with determinism at a subvening physical level. It seems as if this approach has the potential to break the longstanding deadlock in the free will debate, since it concedes to the traditional incompatibilist that agents can only do otherwise if they can do so in their actual circumstances, holding the past and the laws constant, while nonetheless arguing that this ability is compatible with physical determinism. However, we argue that supervenient libertarianism faces some serious problems, and that it fails to break us free from this deadlock within the free will debate.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/disp-2017-0005 | Journal eISSN: 2182-2875 | Journal ISSN: 0873-626X
Language: English, Portuguese
Page range: 219 - 243
Submitted on: Jul 27, 2017
Accepted on: Feb 11, 2017
Published on: Mar 6, 2018
Published by: University of Lisbon
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 4 issues per year

© 2018 Nadine Elzein, Tuomas K. Pernu, published by University of Lisbon
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.