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Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
G.E.M.Anscombe
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Augustine
A.J.Ayer
Mark Balaguer
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
Isaiah Berlin
Bernard Berofsky
Susanne Bobzien
Emil du Bois-Reymond
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
Donald Davidson
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
John Martin Fischer
Owen Flanagan
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Carl Ginet
Nicholas St. John Green
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
William James
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
Christine Korsgaard
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Leucippus
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
John Locke
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
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
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
Plato
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
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
L. Susan Stebbing
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
Voltaire
G.H. von Wright
R. Jay Wallace
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

Michael Arbib
Bernard Baars
John S. Bell
Charles Bennett
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Neils Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Max Born
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
Anthony Cashmore
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
Abraham de Moivre
Paul Dirac
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Albert Einstein
Richard Feynman
Joseph Fourier
GianCarlo Ghirardi
Nicolas Gisin
A.O.Gomes
Joshua Greene
Jacques Hadamard
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
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
Herbert Simon
B. F. Skinner
Antoine Suarez
Leo Szilard
William Thomson (Kelvin)
John von Neumann
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Ernst Zermelo
 
Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
G.E.M.Anscombe
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
Augustine
A.J.Ayer
Isaiah Berlin
George Boole
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Carneades
Ernst Cassirer
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Donald Davidson
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
René Descartes
Richard Double
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
John Martin Fischer
Owen Flanagan
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Carl Ginet
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Ted Honderich
David Hume
William James
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
David Lewis
John Locke
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Alfred Mele
John Stuart Mill
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Friedrich Nietzsche
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
Karl Popper
Willard van Orman Quine
Ayn Rand
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
Moritz Schlick
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
G.H. von Wright
R. Jay Wallace
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists
Kevin Timpe

Kevin Timpe is a Christian philosopher who wrote the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Free Will and serves as the IEP editor for Religion and Philosophy.

Tempe believes that free will can only be grounded if the ultimate source for actions lies entirely within the agent, if our actions are up to us" (Aristotle's ἐφ ἡμῖν). This can only be the case if causal determinism is false.

While Timpe focuses on the "sourcehood" of the agent's origination of - or ultimate responsibility for - actions, he accepts as a corollary that the agent will have genuine alternative possibilities for action, since the existence of alternative possibilities is an indicator of the absence of causal determinism.

But Timpe departs from a prime assumption of those compatibilists who have defended Harry Frankfurt's attacks on alternative possibilities. That assumption is the first premise in what Timpe calls the Basic Argument:

  1. Free will requires the ability to do otherwise (alternative possibilities).
  2. If causal determinism is true, then no agent has the ability to do otherwise (no alternative possibilities).
  3. Therefore, free will requires the falsity of causal determinism (indeterminism is true and alternative possibilities exist).
For Timpe, alternative possibilities are merely a corollary of "sourcehood." He calls himself a Sourcehood Incompatibilist, a position John Martin Fischer calls an "actual-sequence incompatibilist." Fischer himself is a "source compatibilist" since for him the events in the actual sequence are part of a causal chain.

The basic requirement of sourcehood for libertarian free will is that some indeterminism occurs in the "actual sequence" of events leading up to the agent's action. Timpe does not describe in detail how, when, and where such indeterminism might enter the sequence. He does deny that "luck" is a problem, suggesting he is aware that chance must not be the direct cause of an action.

Note that sourcehood incompatibilists can be hard determinists, like Derk Pereboom, who denies both free will and moral responsibility. Since he is agnostic about the truth of determinism (or indeterminism), Pereboom calls himself a "hard incompatibilist."

Since 1962, when Peter Strawson changed the subject from free will to moral responsibility (emphasizing the the natural existence of reactive attitudes and moral behavior), and since 1969, when Harry Frankfurt changed the debate from free will models to his denial of what he called "alternate" possibilities, the focus of attention in "free will debates" has been on moral responsibility and the agential control needed for responsibility.

Compatibilists have leaped at the opportunity to deny alternative possibilities because the determinism that they feel is compatible with free will does not allow alternative possibilities in anything but what Timpe calls a "subjunctive sense." The agent could have done otherwise if he or she had decided to do otherwise, which is possible if the past had been different, an argument first introduced formally by G. E. Moore, but present as early as the Hobbes-Bramhall debates.

In his 2008 book, Free Will: Sourcehood and Its Alternatives, Timpe has an excellent review of the last thirty-five years of debates, especially on the Kane-Widerker arguments which showed that a Frankfurt demon depended on determinism to predict which actions needed to be blocked to insure the agent would "freely" choose the action the intervener wanted. Thus Frankfurt examples "beg the question," assuming determinism to attack alternative possibilities.

Timpe reviews the many abortive attempts by compatibilists to refute Kane-Widerker and other attacks on Frankfurt, including the "flicker of freedom" attack developed by Fischer (though Fischer is himself a compatibilist). The idea is that just at the moment of deciding, the agent could decide to "try" one of the alternative possibilities being blocked by the intervener.

Timpe's assessment of these decades of debate is severe:

In these sorts of circumstances, Fischer thinks, further arguments would be begging the question since the two sides of the debate begin with different premises, often based on intuitions that the other side denies: "I suggest that some of the debates about whether alternative possibilities are required for moral responsibility may at some level be fueled by different intuitive pictures of moral 'responsibility.'"

If this is true, then perhaps it would be true to say that not much philosophical headway has been made in the past 35 years of debate begun by Frankfurt's article. It is certainly true that much is made of various and conflicting intuitions in the debate surrounding the compatibilism/incompatibilism debate. Perhaps the debate is ultimately over which set of intuitions is more plausible, in which case we should not be surprised by the lack of a clear victor.
(Free Will: Sourcehood and Its Alternatives, p.67)

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