The idea that incompatibilism is intuitive is one of the key motivations for incompatibilism. Not surprisingly, then, philosophers who defend incompatibilism often claim that incompatibilism is the natural, commonsense view about free will and moral responsibility (e.g., Pereboom 2001, Kane 1999, Strawson 1986). This claim has received some support from empirical studies that indicate that when...

Proponents of the “Belief in Ability Thesis” (BAT) maintain that one deliberates about whether to perform a given action only if one believes that one can perform the action in question. In An Essay on Free Will, Peter van Inwagen endorsed BAT and deployed it in an argument for the incompatibility of deliberation and consistent belief in the nonexistence of free will. Van Inwagen’s argument att...

Determinism precludes moral responsibility, some think, because causally determined agents cannot make a difference in the world. Let’s say that I raise my arm at a certain time. If determinism is true, there is nothing I could have done that would have resulted in a different state of affairs, that is, in my not raising my arm at that time. For my raising my arm was bound to happen, given the ...

On the Direct Reference thesis, proper names are what I call ‘genuine terms’, terms whose sole semantic contributions to the propositions expressed by their use are the terms’ semantic referents. But unless qualified, this thesis implies the false consequence that sentences containing names that fail to refer can never express true or false propositions. (Consider ‘The ancient Greeks worshipped...

1 The thesis Suppose you start out inclined towards the hard-headed view that the world of material objects is the whole of reality. You elaborate: 'Everything there is is a material object: the sort of thing you could bump into; the sort of thing for which it would be sensible to ask how much it weighs, what shape it is, how fast it is moving, and how far it is from other material objects. The...

object that actually exists but is uninstantiated. (p. 121) No one has gone further to develop the idea that there are two conceptions of possible worlds than van Inwagen in [1986]. He says: . . . Lewis did not content himself with saying that there were entities properly called ‘ways things could have been’; nor did he content himself with implying that ‘possible world’ was a heuristically use...