Citation for this page in APA citation style.           Close


Core Concepts

Adequate Determinism
Agent-Causality
Alternative Possibilities
Causa Sui
Causality
Certainty
Chance
Chance Not Direct Cause
The Cogito Model
Compatibilism
Comprehensive   Compatibilism
Conceptual Analysis
Control
Could Do Otherwise
Creativity
Default Responsibility
De-liberation
Determination
Determination Fallacy
Determinism
Disambiguation
Either Way
Ethical Fallacy
Experimental Philosophy
Extreme Libertarianism
Event Has Many Causes
Frankfurt Cases
Free Choice
Freedom of Action
"Free Will"
Free Will Axiom
Free Will in Antiquity
Free Will Mechanisms
Free Will Requirements
Free Will Theorem
Future Contingency
Hard Incompatibilism
Illusion of Determinism
Illusionism
Impossibilism
Incompatibilism
Indeterminacy
Indeterminism
Infinities
Laplace's Demon
Libertarianism
Liberty of Indifference
Libet Experiments
Luck
Master Argument
Modest Libertarianism
Moral Necessity
Moral Responsibility
Moral Sentiments
Mysteries
Naturalism
Necessity
Noise
Non-Causality
Nonlocality
Origination
Paradigm Case
Pre-determinism
Predictability
Probability
Pseudo-Problem
Random When?/Where?
Rational Fallacy
Responsibility
Same Circumstances
Scandal
Science Advance Fallacy
Second Thoughts
Semicompatibilism
Separability
Soft Causality
Special Relativity
Standard Argument
Taxonomy
Temporal Sequence
Tertium Quid
Torn Decision
Two-Stage Models
Ultimate Responsibility
Uncertainty
Up To Us
Voluntarism

Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
Isaiah Berlin
Bernard Berofsky
Susanne Bobzien
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Carneades
Ernst Cassirer
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Diodorus Cronus
Donald Davidson
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
René Descartes
Richard Double
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Fred Dretske
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
Herbert Feigl
John Martin Fischer
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouillée
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Michael Frede
Carl Ginet
H.Paul Grice
Nicholas St. John Green
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
Ferenc Huoranszki
William James
Lord Kames
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
William King
Christine Korsgaard
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Leucippus
Michael Levin
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
John Locke
Michael Lockwood
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
James Martineau
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Paul E. Meehl
Alfred Mele
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Friedrich Nietzsche
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
Karl Popper
H.A.Prichard
Hilary Putnam
Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
Ayn Rand
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
C.W.Rietdijk
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
T.M.Scanlon
Moritz Schlick
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
L. Susan Stebbing
George F. Stout
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
Voltaire
G.H. von Wright
David Foster Wallace
R. Jay Wallace
W.G.Ward
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

Michael Arbib
Bernard Baars
John S. Bell
Charles Bennett
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Neils Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Emile Borel
Max Born
Stephen Brush
Leon Brillouin
Thomas Buckle
Donald Campbell
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
E. H. Culverwell
Charles Darwin
Abraham de Moivre
Paul Dirac
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Albert Einstein
Paul Ehrenfest
Richard Feynman
Michael Gazzaniga
GianCarlo Ghirardi
Nicolas Gisin
Thomas Gold
A.O.Gomes
Joshua Greene
Jacques Hadamard
Patrick Haggard
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
William Stanley Jevons
Pascual Jordan
Simon Kochen
Stephen Kosslyn
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
David Layzer
Benjamin Libet
Josef Loschmidt
Ernst Mach
Henry Margenau
James Clerk Maxwell
Ernst Mayr
Jacques Monod
Roger Penrose
Steven Pinker
Max Planck
Henri Poincaré
Adolphe Quételet
Jerome Rothstein
Erwin Schrödinger
Claude Shannon
Dean Keith Simonton
Herbert Simon
B. F. Skinner
Henry Stapp
Antoine Suarez
Leo Szilard
William Thomson (Kelvin)
John von Neumann
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Ernst Zermelo

 
Infinities

Some philosophers have attempted to solve the problem of free will by connecting it to the possibility of an infinite number of worlds.

Others have tried to explain the "mystery" of free will in terms of other mysteries, especially quantum puzzles and paradoxes.

Mathematical infinities have the extraordinary capability of including all possible possibilities. This idea can be been extended to the natural world, since the universe is now believed to be physically infinite in space, if not in time.

It appears there was a moment of creation about 13.8 billion years before which the laws of physics as we know them have no explanatory power. Some say that means the universe is not infinite in the direction of past time.

Some popular infinities recruited by philosophers and scientists include

In his 1949 novel, Fredric Brown imagined some of the possibilities for very slight differences in an infinite number of relatively similar worlds.
Out of an infinity of Keith Wintons in an infinity of universes plus an infinity of universes in which there wasn't any Keith Winton plus at least one universe — rather, plus an infinity of universes again — in which Keith Winton had been but was missing after a rocket flash.

But this universe was a real one now. For a while, at least....

This, he thought, was a universe he'd really settle for.

For Teachers
For Scholars

Chapter 3.7 - The Ergod Chapter 4.2 - The History of Free Will
Part Three - Value Part Five - Problems
Normal | Teacher | Scholar