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Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are mutually compatible and that it is possible to believe in both without being logically inconsistent. [1] As Steven Weinberg puts it: "I would say that free will is nothing but our conscious experience of deciding what to do, which I know I am experiencing as I write this review, and this experience is not invalidated by the ...
[11] [12] As philosophers adjusted Lehrer's original (classical) definitions of the terms incompatibilism and compatibilism to reflect their own perspectives on the location of the purported "fundamental divide" among free will theorists, the terms incompatibilism and compatibilism have been given a variety of new meanings.
Compatibilism itself may occupy any of the nine positions, that is, there is no logical contradiction between determinism and free will, and either or both may be true or false in principle. However, the most common meaning attached to compatibilism is that some form of determinism is true and yet we have some form of free will, position (3). [46]
Causal moral luck, which equates largely with the problem of free will, is the least-detailed of the varieties that Thomas Nagel describes. The general definition is that actions are determined by external events and are thus consequences of events over which the person taking the action has no control.
Free will in antiquity is a philosophical and theological concept. Free will in antiquity was not discussed in the same terms as used in the modern free will debates, but historians of the problem have speculated who exactly was first to take positions as determinist, libertarian, and compatibilist in antiquity. [1]
Traditionally, compatibilists (defenders of the compatibility of free will and causal determinism, like A. J. Ayer, Walter Terence Stace, and Daniel Dennett) reject premise two. On a compatibilist analysis, an agent could have done otherwise just in case the counterfactual conditional 'if the agent had wanted to do otherwise, then he would have ...
The resulting philosophical debates, which involved the confluence of elements of Aristotelian Ethics with Stoic psychology, led in the 1st–3rd centuries CE in the works of Alexander of Aphrodisias to the first recorded Western debate over determinism and freedom, [50] an issue that is known in theology as the paradox of free will.
Alvin Plantinga's free-will defense is a logical argument developed by the American analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga and published in its final version in his 1977 book God, Freedom, and Evil. [1] Plantinga's argument is a defense against the logical problem of evil as formulated by the philosopher J. L. Mackie beginning in 1955.