The Research Seminar Series in Philosophy invites you to a seminar with Christian Loew, Umeå University, "What makes us free".
We often take ourselves to decide and act freely. If that is ever true, it is not a brute fact. Something about us and our relation to the world must explain our freedom. This talk develops a layered account of free will that combines insights from actual sequence and alternative possibilities views. At the first level, freedom depends on the actual causal history of an action: free actions are caused, in the right way, by reasons. At a deeper level, what makes a given causal sequence freedom-conferring is in turn explained by the agent’s possession of certain unexercised abilities to do otherwise. This account preserves Harry Frankfurt’s key insight that only factors that explain an action matter for whether it is free, while making room for abilities to do otherwise. These abilities do not causally explain free actions, but they ground why certain causal histories are freedom-conferring.
All interested are welcome to this meeting.
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