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Zusatztext His complex and carefully argued book ... is the culmination of twenty-five years of thought on the matter ... How successful is Kane in providing an account of freedom of the will is both adequate and to our pre-theoretical understanding and yet consonant with physical theorizing? In my judgement, he has gone farther than any other philosopher working within the constraint of making no basic ontological posits concerning only persons and their capacities. Klappentext In the past quarter-century! there has been a resurgence of interest in philosophical questions about free will. After a clear and broad-reaching survey of these recent debates! Robert Kane presents his own controversial view. Arguing persuasively for a traditional incompatibilist or libertarian conception of free will! Kane demonstrates that such a conception can be made intelligible without appeals to obscure or mysterious forms of agency and thus can be reconciled with a contemporary scientific picture of the world. Zusammenfassung Kane offers an account of the issues surrounding free will and moral responsibility. He presents a version of the "incompatibilist" or "libertarian" view of free will, defending the classic view of free will as "the power of agents to be the ultimate creators and sustainers of their own ends and purposes" against a range of modern critics.
List of contents
- 1: Introduction
- I. The Ascent Problem:Compatibility and Significance
- 2: Will
- 3: Responsibility
- 4: Alternative Possibilities
- 5: Ultimate Responsibility
- 6: Significance
- II. The Descent Problem: Intelligibility and Existence
- 7: Plurality and Indeterminism
- 8: Moral and Prudential Choice
- 9: Efforts, Purposes, and Practical Reason
- 10: Objections and Responses
- 11: Conclusion
- Notes
- References
- Index
