Many philosophers hold that free will consists in the exercise of an agent's irreducible causal powers. However, it is controversial whether a powers-based approach to free will is compatible with determinism or not. In two papers published in this journal, Mumford and Anjum (2014) and Conti (2025) offer opposite answers to this question: Mumford and Anjum argue that a powers-based theory of free will implies incompatibilism, whereas Conti argues that it implies compatibilism. In this article, I defend Mumford and Anjum's view against Conti's objections. My argument will be based on some crucial clarifications regarding the definition of determinism.
Randolph Clarke argues that the following thesis is false: If incompatibilism is true, then for a human agent to perform a directly free action, the agent’s exercise of causal power must not be governed by any laws of nature, not even by probabilistic ones. That is, he argues that the exercise of free will could be g...
Abstract In Leibniz’s mature philosophy, contingency was a necessary condition for freedom. Yet it remains a puzzle in what exact sense free acts are contingent for him. I argue that his faculty psychology holds the key to resolving this puzzle. On my interpretation, an act is contingent if it is metaphysically conting...
Ali Fatollahi· Archiv für Geschichte der Ph...· 0 citations
Recent critiques of metaphysics tend to focus on arguing that it is methodologically unreliable, otherwise epistemically deficient, and/or irrelevant to practical concerns. Defenders counter that metaphysics is continuous with science, an unavoidable part of inquiry, and/or already yielding valuable results. So far, ne...
Sam Baron, Finnur Dellsén, James Norton· Synthese· 0 citations
How are we to think of causality in a monistic world? In particular, how do we apportion causal power between the many things existing in the world and the One thing of which the world fundamentally consists, or as Spinoza would put it, between modes and the one substance of which all of us are modes, namely God or Nat...
Josefine Klingspor· Ergo, An Open Access Journal...· 0 citations
The existence of middle-sized systems in the universe is far from accidental; it carries significant consequences for our understanding of both physics and metaphysics, bearing on the epistemic assumptions of the former and the role of causality in the latter. By examining how science actually engages with individual...
This article argues that Russell's paradox can be solved by amending the theory in a zigzag fashion. The first part of the article sets out several reasons why this kind of revision to Frege's system is preferable to other solutions. More specifically, we argue that the extensionality function implicitly described by F...
Ludovica Conti· Teorema. Revista Internacion...· 0 citations
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