Other Issues

Abstract

Freedom of the will is a huge topic both historically and in contemporary philosophy. I’ve aimed in this book to cover what seem to be the positions and arguments that are most discussed by contemporary metaphysicians, but I’ve had to leave plenty out along the way in the interest of brevity. In this chapter, I provide a brief and partial survey of some issues that I have hitherto ignored or skirted around. In §7.2, I discuss free will and foreknowledge; and in §7.3, I explain the apparent threat to freedom of the will posed by recent research in neuroscience. In §7.4, I consider what role our intuitions about the various thought experiments described in this book ought to have in the debate about free will and why; and I consider whether, and to what extent, ‘experimental philosophy’ might be useful in this regard. Finally, in §7.5, I consider the question of what ‘morally responsible’ really means, and indeed whether this is a question that needs to be decisively answered if we are to make progress in our thinking about free will.