Högre seminariet i filosofi bjuder in till ett seminarium med Christian Löw. Seminariet ges på engelska och har den engelska titeln "Free Will, Preemption, and Doing Otherwise".
Alla intresserade är välkomna till detta seminarium.
A natural idea is that free will requires the ability to do otherwise: if you freely do φ, you must have been able to do otherwise than φ. Philosophers who accept this requirement face two pressing questions: Is it compatible with determinism, where your action is entailed by the past and the laws of nature? And how should we understand Frankfurt-style cases, where an agent seems free despite apparently lacking genuine alternatives? A promising compatibilist strategy holds that the ability to do otherwise is preserved in both scenarios because, when assessing an agent’s abilities, we may abstract away from background factors such as the exact past or external interference. The challenge, however, is to articulate a principled account of what must be held fixed and what may be varied. In this talk, I argue that this problem has an exact analogue in the metaphysics of causation, where counterfactual theories must likewise abstract away from interfering factors in cases of redundant causation. This parallel is significant: it both supports the viability of a compatibilist account of the ability to do otherwise and illuminates what such an account should look like.
I Högre seminariet i filosofi ventileras avhandlingsavsnitt och annan forskning i filosofi.
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