Free Will (Blackwell Readings)

Context

Free Will (2002), edited by Robert Kane, is one of the most widely used anthologies in the philosophy of free will, part of the Blackwell Readings in Philosophy series. Kane, himself a leading libertarian philosopher known for his event-causal theory of free will, assembled the essential primary texts and landmark essays that define the contemporary debate. The volume spans the entire history of the problem — from the ancient Greeks, through Hume and Kant, to twentieth-century debates over determinism, compatibilism, and moral responsibility — making it the standard entry point for students and researchers alike.

Core Arguments

The anthology is organized around the central positions in the free will debate. Incompatibilism holds that free will is incompatible with determinism: if every event is caused by prior events, then our choices are not up to us. Compatibilism — defended by Hume in a classic formulation and developed by modern philosophers — argues that free will is compatible with determinism, since freedom consists in acting according to one's own desires without external constraint. Libertarianism insists both that determinism is false and that we possess the kind of free will that incompatibilism demands. The volume also collects the key arguments: Peter van Inwagen's consequence argument, Harry Frankfurt's counterexamples to the principle of alternate possibilities, and contemporary debates about moral responsibility and the self.

Key Concepts

The volume introduces the concepts that structure the debate: determinism, the thesis that every event has sufficient causes; the principle of alternate possibilities, the claim that one is morally responsible only if one could have done otherwise; moral responsibility, the standing to be praised or blamed; agent causation, the idea that persons — not merely events — can be causes; and the consequence argument, which holds that if determinism is true, our actions are consequences of events in the remote past, over which we had no control. Kane's own essays defend a form of libertarianism based on "self-forming actions."

Legacy & Influence

The anthology crystallized the modern shape of the free will debate and remains a standard teaching text. Its juxtaposition of classical sources with contemporary essays — including neuroscientific perspectives and the work of philosophers like Daniel Dennett and Galen Strawson — reflects the field's interdisciplinary turn. It is especially valuable for understanding how the free will problem connects to moral responsibility, the self, and the philosophy of mind, and how developments in neuroscience (such as the Libet experiments) have reshaped public and philosophical discussion.

Reading Guide

Begin with Hume's compatibilist classic, then read van Inwagen's consequence argument and Frankfurt's "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility" — the three pillars of the modern debate. Follow with Kane's introduction, which maps the positions, and conclude with the neuroscientific selections to see how empirical findings bear on the philosophical questions. The collection pairs naturally with what is free will, compatibilism, and determinism vs free will for a full survey.

Related Works

Related titles in the knowledge base include Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained and I Am a Strange Loop, which engage free will from the philosophy of mind; Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit, which connects personal identity and responsibility; and Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which documents the psychological limits of conscious control.