charles renouvier free will essay pdf

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William James and Renouvier’s Neo-Kantianism: Belief, Experience and Consciousness

Mathias Girel is Associate Professor at École normale supérieure-PSL. He conducts research on Pragmatism, and, in philosophy and history of science, on the themes of the instrumentalisation of doubt and the production of ignorance. In Pragmatism, he publishes on the Pragmatists’ sundry accounts of practice and on their philosophy of mind. He has translated James’s Essays in Radical Empiricim (in collaboration with G. Garreta), and has just published L'Esprit en acte (Paris, Vrin, 2021).

• Published: 18 August 2022
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In this chapter, while acknowledging an important and famous early influence of Renouvier on James’s notions of belief and free will, the author documents a major and growing disagreement in their exchanges. The author argues that this disagreement is by no means a peripheral matter, since it involves James’s assessment of Renouvier’s neo-Kantianism. After having presented the core of Renouvier’s main influence in the section “Free Will’s Champion, Kantian Style,” the author gives a brief survey of James’s presence in the  Critique Philosophique  in the section “James’s Contributions,” and deals, in the following sections, with James’s early criticisms of Renouvier on philosophical method (the section “Methods and Categories”), on the perception of space and time (the section ”Unbounded Spaces”) and on consciousness (the section ”The Stream of Thought”). In order to accomplish this, the author focuses on a more limited period than James' career as a whole: the author follows him from the early writings to the mid-1880s—that is, precisely to the point where James and Renouvier's philosophical itineraries begin to diverge. The author’s larger goal is to illustrate how the  Critique Philosophique  was at first a hospitable publication for the young James, but also how, from the end of this period on, important disputes emerged, in particular over consciousness, which gave rise to a paradoxical situation: the very organ that contributed to make James known turned out to be at odds with several of his most important theses, before the publication of the  Principles , and even more before  Pragmatism .

Introduction

The two-way relationship between James and Renouvier is a well-known landmark in the history of philosophy. 1 Any reader of James will know the entry from his diary, in 1870, where he recorded the revelation inspired by Renouvier’s philosophy of free will: having read the French philosopher in the midst of a philosophical crisis, 2 James claimed that he had chosen to follow Renouvier’s lead, and to believe “freely in free will.” We also know that Renouvier’s philosophical journal, La Critique Philosophique , published and translated James’s earliest articles, starting with “Quelques considérations sur la méthode subjective” (EPh 1878, 23–31) in 1878, contributing significantly to James’s international fame and even to his career in America. There are several ways to address this relationship: some have stressed one aspect—the will to believe doctrine, or pluralism more generally—while others have been more concerned with the role of idealism in their thought and with the general neo-Kantian influence on James. 3 All these studies contain precious insights and provide a better understanding of James’s philosophy, but I will focus here on the complexity of their relationship, which involves agreements as well as major disagreements.

My concern here is not to document the trivial fact that a major philosophy is not confined to a single claim and that philosophers can agree on one point and disagree on others. My goal is rather to show that, in the exchanges between Renouvier and James, a major threefold disagreement over philosophical method, mind, and perception soon emerged, and that this disagreement was by no means a peripheral matter, if we have James’s development as an original philosopher in the 1880s in view. This should not lead us to downplay Renouvier’s influences, but rather to articulate this uncontroversial influence with other claims James was endorsing. With rare exceptions, a major philosophy is not built at the outset and is not only the synthesis of “influences.” This is true of James: the problem of determinism was at the core of his first philosophy, but the philosophy of psychology and of mind were crucial in the 1880s, as well as the three problems of “exceptional mental states,” radical empiricism, and ethics in the 1890s, not to mention pragmatism after 1898 and the sundry attempts at reconciling radical empiricism and the holistic view of consciousness after 1900. Some of these concerns led him to reassess his debt toward Renouvier.

In order to show this, we have to dig deeper than the standard narrative, not because it is wrong—it is correct in its general features—but because it does not get to the essence of the relationship between James and Renouvier. What do Renouvier and his magazine represent for James? Why was the author who was to found an “American philosophy,” in the eyes of the editors, published in the columns of a neo-Kantian publication? Indeed, there are surprisingly few detailed studies on this, 4 and those that are detailed generally address one aspect only—the will to believe, idealism, or the question of what philosophy is and what it does.

After having presented the core of Renouvier’s main influence in the section “Free Will’s Champion, Kantian Style,” I shall give a brief survey of James’s presence in the Critique Philosophique in the section “James’s Contributions,” and shall deal, in the following sections, with James’s early criticisms of Renouvier on philosophical method (the section “Methods and Categories”), on the perception of space and time (the section “Unbounded Spaces”) and on consciousness (the section “The Stream of Thought”). In order to accomplish this, I shall give myself here a somewhat more limited period than James’s career as a whole: I shall follow him from the early writings to the series of articles of 1884–1885 that would be so important both for psychology and for philosophy—that is, precisely to the point where James and Renouvier’s philosophical itineraries begin to diverge. 5 I shall illustrate how the Critique philosophique was at first a hospitable publication for the young James, but also how, from the end of this period on, important disputes emerged, in particular over consciousness, which gave rise to a paradoxical situation: the very organ that contributed to make James known turned out to be at odds with several of his most important theses, before the publication of the Principles , and even more before Pragmatism .

Free Will’s Champion, Kantian Style

Two sides of the relationship.

On James’s side, the relationship entails an admiration for Renouvier, from the first texts to the last ones. I have mentioned James’s diary, for April 30th, 1870, where he writes, about the Essais de Critique générale :

I finished the first part of Renouvier’s Second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will – “the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts” – need be the definition of an illusion. … My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. 6

Renouvier stands first as a philosopher of freedom, but he is also, for James, more and more a “pluralist” philosopher, insofar as he criticizes the claims of neo-Hegelian monism. Nearly forty years later, James would dedicate his unfinished work, Some Problems of Philosophy , to Renouvier’s pluralism, stressing that without him, he would “never have got free from the monistic superstition under which [he] had grown up” (SPP 1911, 85).

This is an important acknowledgment indeed, even if it implies that this influence was at its strongest in his very early texts. The Principles of Psychology , just in between, was dedicated to François Pillon, one of Renouvier’s disciples, editor both for the Critique Philosophique and for the Année Philosophique . The dedication underlines the role this periodical played in the diffusion of James’s ideas (PP 1890, front matter).

Renouvier’s influence on James was not missed by his contemporaries. Horace Kallen, just after James’ death, wrote, in reference to Renouvier, that “it was from France that William James received his first philosophical inspiration, from France that he received his first recognition and his greatest honor” ( Kallen 1911 , 583). This was a quite clear reference to the complex role of the latter in the formation and subsequent dissemination of James’ ideas.

For Renouvier’s part, James seems to be at first a European ally, and sometimes the prototype of an emerging character, the “American” philosopher. An ally, since Renouvier interprets James’s texts as a local version of his own criticism: “your version of criticisme ”—he would say after one of James’s publications—“is presented with a startling originality, or happiness of expression, with an accent of your own.” 7 James’s philosophy is a “version,” the originality is “of expression,” and this is certainly what prompts Renouvier to translate, to comment upon James, and finally to introduce him to his French readers. Renouvier also holds that James is to found an “American philosophy,” but in one letter the phrase is underlined, which suggests that this category is still unstable: “Your originality, your direct view of that which is really to be seen , will lose rather than gain by much reading, and especially by the reading of German philosophical books. It seems to me when I read you that you are called to found an American philosophy . So it would not do for you to make sacrifices to alien gods ( dieux étrangers ).” 8 This sounds like a paradoxical prophecy, since James was then quoting at length a French philosopher, another “alien god”, but this should not obscure the first part of the letter, which portrays James as an original philosopher and as a key character of an “emerging” American philosophy. 9

From James’s perspective, there are many reasons why he could be interested in Renouvier. First, he persistently looked for alternative “champions.” His acknowledgments of Renouvier, Hodgson, Peirce, Blood, and even Royce at first, have all the same structure: they seem to endorse a “way out” of the extant alternatives in favor of a minor voice or of an unorthodox philosophic position. Renouvier was in no way a representative of the main, dominant philosophical schools, whether empiricist, neo-Hegelian, naturalist, or even positivist. Still, in the late 1860s and the 1870s, Renouvier was, for James, the French philosopher and his Essais de Critique Générale “the ablest philosophical speculation to which France has given birth during this century” (ECR 1873, 266). 10 “Playing,” so to speak, Renouvier against other major philosophers was similar to a wager, as appears clearly in later correspondence with Alice: on James’s telling, Hodgson calls Renouvier “the most important philosophical writer of our time—You can’t think how it pleaseth me to have this evidence that I have not been a fool in sticking so to R” (CWJ 1880, 5.109). But obviously, Renouvier’s alternative status was not the main reason why James was interested in him. It would have been more important that Renouvier was, at that time, fighting hard against monists, absolutists, and, most of all, determinists.

James had noticed Renouvier as early as 1868, when the latter had published a long “note” on the state of philosophy in France ( Renouvier 1868 ). Writing to his father, James claimed that it differed from the “namby pamby diffusiveness” ( sic ) of most French philosophers (CWJ 1868, 4.342). In this note by Renouvier, two major Jamesian concerns and a philosophical problem already stand out.

Firstly, Renouvier criticized extant positions (Cousin, Royer-Collard, and Comte among others) and the general determinist atmosphere of the nineteenth century. Bringing together Hegel, the positivists, and the eclectics, he showed that they were all, in fact, subscribing to common principles:

A cosmic progress, which is both God and the World, a human progress inherent in the substance, so to speak, of humanity, and which leads it to its goal, necessarily, by all paths; an action of the environment which everywhere, in the universe, in society, generates the individual, shapes him in his states and induces him to his actions: these are the principles. Then there is a marked weakening of the notions of responsibility and duty, a marked tendency to legitimize the fact and the force, to sanction either the march of things as it is and as the best, by losing interest in the events that always go best without us, with us, against us, sometimes, or, if we think we can foresee it, to justify the injustice of the Prince by the Reason of State and that of the citizen by the Sovereignty of the Goal; a certain obliteration, not, for sure, of the feeling of good and noble passions, but of the notion of strict justice and belief in the freedom of the moral agent. ( Renouvier 1868 , 99–100, my translation)

In a few lines, all the moral and political consequences of determinism were traced.

Secondly, against this “philosophy of the Nineteenth century,” Renouvier advocated a philosophy “which brings back and subordinates everything to the recognition of human freedom. This recognition is itself a free act, and this act, critical philosophy requires each of us to do it, then to pursue its results in all orders of intelligence and life” ( Renouvier 1868 , 107). This summed up, in a few words, exactly what appealed to James in the midst of his philosophical and existential crisis, and a good part of what he would develop in his early essays.

Thirdly, there is a problem. There is an underlying Kantian spirit to Renouvier’s philosophy. The last section of the “Note” recommends a kind of “back to Kant” strategy, and a good part of the ambiguity in the James-Renouvier relationship starts just here. The problem is not that a good deal of pragmatism can be read as a revision of the transcendental in a naturalistic (and social) setting. Such a reading has been offered, for example, by Sami Pihlström (2011 , 7). 11 Nor is it that, as Carlson (1997) has suggested, one can find an equivalent of the four main Kantian questions in James. 12 The concern is rather that James is generally very attentive to the presuppositions of major empiricists and evolutionists of his time—he even has a special flair for excavating them—and it is startling that he would not devote the same critical attention to the Kantian presuppositions of Renouvier’s philosophy at that time. Again, this is not a peripheral question: Renouvier explicitly emphasizes his debt to Kant, as well as key points of divergence from Kant. 13 These criticisms are defining features of his own philosophy, so much so that to understand Renouvier is also to understand his particular, critical way of reading Kant . 14

Four Renouvieran Claims

An important feature of Kantianism is its systematicity, and Renouvier is also a systematic philosopher. When their exchanges really began in 1872, James wrote to Renouvier to ask him for a copy of Jules Lequier’s Recherche d’une première vérité , 15 which Renouvier had cited, 16 and the young James congratulated Renouvier for having proposed an “intelligible and reasonable conception of freedom” (CWJ 1872, 4.430). Giving a complete account of Renouvier’s system—of this “reasonable conception”—is beyond the scope of this chapter, but one can borrow a description from Pillon’s summary of Renouvier’s philosophy, just after his death:

The essential principles by which reformed criticism or neocriticism [= Renouvier] is opposed to Kant’s criticism consist in the triple negation of noumena, of the infinity of quantity and of the universal determinism of phenomena. On the other hand, by the important role he gives to the categories or laws of reason, he opposes David Hume’s empirical phenomenalism. It is very precisely characterized by the terms rational phenomenalism, finitism and libertarism. ( Pillon 1904 , 310)

Let’s stress four points, which correspond roughly to four claims by Renouvier:

The first, already mentioned, is obvious and endorsed repeatedly by Renouvier: 17 the main touchstone for him is Kant. The goal is not to circumvent Kant, as James will recommend later in his “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” but to refine his position, by purging it in particular of the last remains of substantialist metaphysics.

“Phenomenism” 18 consists here mainly in the dismissal of the “thing in itself” and the “noumena”: “Things are given to knowledge as representations. Things as representations are phenomena. … There is no knowledge of a thing in itself; but everything stands as complex, and relative to other things, in the relationship in which it stands” ( Renouvier 1859 , i–ii, my translation; for more on Renouvier’s phenomenism, see Dunham , this volume). We never know anything but phenomena. They are not appearances of something other than themselves. Still, Renouvier claims, against Hume and his more recent followers, that it is necessary to allow for categories and a priori forms. He does not deduce them from the forms of judgment, as in Kant. But he offers several tentative lists in the course of his life. He describes them in the First Essays as “laws of representation,” the category of relation being the most universal. 19 There are phenomena and relationships between them: “to be” is to be, or to be in, a relationship. As Renouvier clearly summarizes in the preface to the Second Essays , “the word being expresses the relationship, both in general acceptance and in all particular meanings.” ( Renouvier 1859 , ii) His way of explaining this should ring a bell for contemporary readers: “A being is a function. The definition of beings in the different spheres of knowledge is that of the functions that constitute them, and outside of which nothing real is known or knowable” ( Renouvier 1859 , iii). In other words, well before Cassirer (another neo-Kantian), 20 Renouvier clearly tells us that substance is function: it’s all about relationships. This is also one overlooked source of Renouvier’s pluralism: one can perfectly imagine encompassing systems of relationships widely independent from each other. “Two worlds entirely different from and alien to each other could … coexist in the same places” ( Renouvier 1864a , 24).

This philosophy defends finitism , which is characterized by the negation of all “actual infinity.” Renouvier’s conversion to “finitism” and what he later called the principe du nombre dates back to the 1850s: the idea of an infinite number seems to him to be deeply contradictory (for more on Renouvier’s principe du nombre , see Bordogna , this volume). Any notion of an infinite number is a misleading way of actualizing an indefinite enumeration, which is again a Kantian move: the actual infinite is an erroneous reification of a never-ending process of synthesis. Renouvier would draw the consequences of his “finitism” in many regions of philosophy, including cosmology and creation. His world is finite; it has and includes absolute beginnings.

Renouvier finds freedom behind all certitude (even behind determinist claims). The doctrine does not presuppose any “noumenal” freedom, and there are at least three steps involved:

A claim about the will. The will is not, for Renouvier, a mysterious and “mythological” entity, but, in phenomenal terms, is the power to sustain an idea, the idea itself giving rise to movements and actions. There is no need of an intermediary act between the representation and the movement, as the classical account of the will would have it: representations themselves are followed by movements, whether voluntary or not. For Renouvier, the action of the will is psychical through and through: it is only a name for a certain relationship our attention has with a representation.

A claim about assent and certitude. One can refer to Lequier, but the idea that the primacy of practical reason plays an important role even in epistemology and metaphysics can be traced to Fichte too. In The Destination of Man , Fichte argued that “the organ by which to apprehend” reality is “not knowledge, for knowledge can only demonstrate and establish itself.” 21 Renouvier found freedom even in theoretical assertions:

We can affirm nothing systematically without any representation of a group of relationships as true, nor without an attraction of any kind that leads us to commit ourselves in this way to the perceived truth, nor without a determination of the will that is fixed, whereas it would seem possible to suspend judgment and seek new motives and new reasons, or simply to abandon ourselves to everything that presents itself. ( Renouvier 1859 , 377)

This belief requirement holds not only for morals, but for all kinds of knowledge.

A claim about free will, which is a direct consequence of the two other claims. Freedom, freedom of the will, free acts, belief, and certainty are just different aspects of the more fundamental process of holding fast to an idea. The previous argument about certitude applies to all statements, and in particular to the alternative between determinism and free will: we can choose to endorse either side, but if we choose determinism, we should be aware that we are freely endorsing the very negation of freedom.

Most of Renouvier’s influences on James, early on, can be traced to the “destructive” virtues of phenomenism or to variants of the fourth claim about free will.

In addition to reading Renouvier, James also introduced him to American readers, through reviews, in 1873, and again in 1876. Renouvier endorsed James’s reading, in particular the comparisons between his own philosophy and the British empiricist, associationist, and determinist doctrines ( Perry 1929 , 6). The 1873 and 1876 reviews do not deal with criticism in its technical, Kantian sense, but each one clearly articulates the second and the fourth claims mentioned.

In the 1873 piece, a review of La Critique Philosophique , 22 James clearly underlines the originality of Renouvier, compared to absolutists as well as to determinist phenomenists: “he finds the possibility , which British empiricism denies, of absolute beginnings, or, in other words, of free will” (ECR 1873, 266). Novelty is not only an appearance but an indefeasible dimension of action. James also gives his version of the fourth claim:

Since we may affirm free-will, what more fitting than that its first act should be that of its own self-affirmation? So that we have an act enthroned at the heart of philosophic thought. Liberty is the centre of gravity of the system, which henceforth becomes a moral philosophy. (ECR 1873, 266)

In the second, more complete review (ECR 1876, 321–327), James gives a more detailed account of the last claim. The core of his version of 4(a) is the “stable survival of one representation,” which is called a “volition” (ECR 1876, 324). Then the question is to assess whether this “survival” is predetermined or involves some free act. For James, the choice in favor of one of the options in the dilemma of determinism is not a mere intellectual affair; it involves the entire human nature: “the entire nature of man, intellectual, affective, and volitional is (whether avowedly or not) exhibited in the theoretical attitude he takes in such a question as [determinism vs. indeterminism]” (ECR 1876, 325). Secondly, Renouvier’s account of belief, as belonging to the “active” dimension of our intellectual life, contains most of the elements of the conception that James would develop for the next two decades: “the act of belief and the object of belief coalesce, and the very essential logic of the situation demands that we wait not for any outward sign, but, with the possibility of doubting open to us, voluntarily take the alternative of faith” (ECR 1876, 326). James would be permanently struck by the fact that, if there is no theoretical solution to the dilemma between determinism and freedom, the solution can only be practical.

Of course, it is possible to locate elsewhere Renouvier’s main influence. Renouvier’s role, if one follows Jean Wahl, is then that of a philosophical “catalyst” that enabled James to sharpen his ideas, particularly in the critique of the “triple illusion of infinity, substance and necessity” ( Wahl 2004 , 103). More importantly, the recognition of the irreducibility of time would have made Renouvier, and James later, conceive of a universe made up of “pulsations of time, discontinuous surges in duration” ( Wahl 2004 , 103). Indeed, James himself had noted this point in his review of the New Monadology , insisting on Renouvier’s cosmology, where “the world, so far as real, is like an immense pulsation composed of a number (unassignable though at all times determinate) of concerted elementary pulsations of different grades” (ECR 1893, 443). To this is added the recognition of the radical evil that alone gives meaning to the meliorist attitude, and we thus have, with pluralism and the possibility of evil, two dimensions common to both authors, which were to interest James until the end. But the pluralist strain is not prominent in the 1870s papers, even though it would become a major concern later, in particular when James developed his radical empiricism and his moral philosophy, for example in “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.”

We have two different perspectives here: in the 1870s, Renouvier sees James as developing in an original way his own neo-criticism, 23 that is to say a refined form of Kantianism, while James reads Renouvier as belonging to a “trend launched by Hume.” 24 The term phenomenism certainly allowed such a misunderstanding, and was at the very least ambiguous. In the 1870s, though, James remains unconvinced, even if he does not voice his criticisms, when it comes to Renouvier’s Kantianism about categories. Renouvier’s indeterminism was undoubtedly welcome for James’ empirical and indeterminist temperament, but Renouvier’s claims about pluralism 25 and infinity were to remain an open question. In any case, for a time at least, the two men could feel they were on a common path: Renouvier reading James’s texts as an original and striking formulation of the practical postulates of theoretical activity; James reading Renouvier as an inspiration regarding free will and as offering a radical critique of philosophical superstitions then dominant (what Renouvier calls “idolology”).

James’s Contributions

Soon after he began corresponding with Renouvier, James became a contributor for the Critique Philosophique but, interestingly, his contributions mostly involve variants of the fourth claim. There is an influence, an agreement, and perhaps a philosophical program shared by both philosophers, but one should keep in mind that it involves only one part of what constitutes for Renouvier a system, and, conversely, only one part of the philosophy James is developing.

Indeed, 1877–1878 is a turning point in James’s development. That year he wrote his first paper, “ Quelques considérations sur la méthode subjective ,” (EPh 1878, 23–31) in which he argued in favor of indeterminism and of the efficacy of free will. Renouvier added an introduction. James, relying on “the principles of the philosophy to which [Renouvier’s] review is dedicated” asked whether “one [can] be justified in rejecting a theory which many objective facts apparently confirm, solely because it does not in any way respond to our inward preferences” (EPh 1878, 331).

This did not mean, of course, defending a right to believe in a thesis that has been positively refuted. Instead, James was reflecting on what guides the adoption of a philosophy, when several positions are in competition and when nothing makes it possible to decide definitively in favor of one or the other. James’ argument was both critical and constructive. It was critical in showing that in some scientific versions of philosophy, choices were expressed that were not necessarily argued for. He contended, in short, that a philosophical temperament was at play. The argument was constructive because it linked the adoption of a philosophy, concerning for example “pessimism” or “optimism,” to underlying temperamental preferences, affects, and postulates. For James, this choice was not determined univocally by the “facts” or by the “data,” but by the whole nature of man.

James presented his paper as compatible with Renouvier’s views, 26 and Renouvier concured. 27 A line of thinking, prominent in Chapters 2 to 5 of the Will to Believe , appears thus for the first time in the late 1870s, in Renouvier’s Critique . These chapters, in The Will to Believe , often pay due compliments to Renouvier 28 and develop the insights we have discerned in the last section “Free Will’s Champion, Kantian Style.”

This first paper in French is the only text written solely for the Critique . Later French papers are usually summaries and translations. 29 James, then, is a frequent contributor between 1878 and 1884, as well as the only non-French regular author for this journal.

In addition to Renouvier’s short introductions to his translations, some of James’s views are discussed in detail in Renouvier’s books. For example, Renouvier’s Esquisse d’une Classification (1885–1886) provides an account of James’s analysis of the teleological nature of mind and of faith. 30 Renouvier reproduces large portions of James’s articles that had been translated in the Critique , emphasizing and agreeing with passages where James showed that in all mentality, sensation, representation, and action are indissolubly linked, as he had shown in “Reflex Action and Theism” and, before, in his 1878 article on Spencer’s definition of the mind as correspondence (Eph 1878, 7–22). Renouvier put the following description of misleading philosophical claims, criticized both by himself and by James, at the end of his summary:

1 st Pretention to make all philosophical questions subjects of scientific decision; particularly, to impose from now on, in the name of Science, the negation of the most ordinary objects of philosophical or religious “faith,” as irreconcilable with scientific theories that we imagine are free from hypothesis and unshakeable. 2 nd Pretending to banish from the human mind any belief in philosophical matters, and to give philosophy the same limit as the sciences, which is correct generalizations, so that one recognizes never being able to reach the ancient objects of philosophy and religion. 3 rd The claim to arrive, through the natural progress of humanity, at the establishment of a definitive philosophical and religious authority, prohibiting any critical examination [of that authority], and decreeing forever what is and remains, in all things, or [decreeing] the truth or the equivalent of truth, in relation to the social organism and universal happiness. 4 th Philosophy’s own claim to reach, through its own method, either a priori or a posteriori, a solution to questions with such evidence that, since doubt is no longer possible for those who examine it, an area of faith no longer exists except for the ignorant. Renouvier (1885–1886, 326), my translation.

Renouvier gave James new readers, like a certain Charles Jeanmaire, who in his Idée de la personnalité humaine dans la psychologie moderne (1882) noted the close link between belief and will in both Renouvier and James: “If volition, considered in itself, consists only in acting on ideas, in order to maintain them, suspend them, discard them, in what does it differ from belief, which is also an act by which we accept or reject ideas? Mr James, again following Mr Renouvier’s example, thinks that the difference is not great” ( Jeanmaire 1882 , 315). In other words, in France, in the 1880s, there were readers who understood very well that the two terms that James was going to unite in The Will to Believe (volition and belief) designated two aspects of the same process.

There were more famous readers, for example Joseph Delboeuf, who devoted some fifteen pages in the Revue Philosophique to James’s paper on “the Feeling of Effort,” just published in the Critique ( Delboeuf 1881 ), or again Bergson who, in the opening pages of his Essais sur les données immédiates de la conscience , quotes the same paper ( Bergson 1889 , 16–17). James’s papers in the Critique give his philosophy a distinctive footprint in France, and this first reception had enduring consequences: his French readers were acquainted with the core of his Will-to-Believe papers, and these discussions provided the background when the controversy over pragmatism and radical empiricism started around 1900. His later views, most of them not translated into French until the end of the decade, were thus read from the perspective of The Will to Believe .

Still, when James and Renouvier finally met in 1880 (CWJ 1880, 5.135), serious doubts were beginning to temper James’ admiration.

Method and Categories

From both perspectives, a gap began opening. In James’s eyes, the differences between Renouvier and the narrow rationalism he was allegedly fighting were becoming less and less evident. As for Renouvier (and his lieutenants), James seemed to reach conclusions that were in tension with his earlier commitments. After the reception of “What Is an Emotionn” and of “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology,” as new trends emerged in James’s psychology, important differences would surface, even if in his very last letter to Renouvier, James still insisted that he was one of his disciples. 31

One reason a gap was opening was related to the naturalistic context of James’s thought. It might be claimed, and has been claimed, that Darwin’s ideas were another important influence on James. Still, despite James’s later efforts to find points of agreement between Renouvier’s system and evolution (ECR 1893, 444), Renouvier had strong concerns over Darwin:

Evolution is a craze ( une toquade ). It will last fifteen or twenty years, and then we shall again speak of it as one spoke of the system of Lamarck at the time of Cuvier. So the world goes. It will be found strange to have, on behalf of gratuitous inductions and in the name of experimental method, denied such a fact as the existence of species, which crève les yeux [stares you in the face], as we say in French. 32

Renouvier was also extremely dubious about the role psycho-physiological schemes were beginning to play in James’s thought. This is true of the 1884 text on emotions, but the most interesting documents are provided by the papers on the will. In 1888, Renouvier translated James’s paper on “What the Will Effects” (EPs 1888, 216–234) and added some remarks ( Renouvier 1888 ), which were soon followed by a reply from James (EPs 1888, 235–238). These remarks expressed both admiration for James—insofar as his views converged with Renouvier’s own utterances, thirty years before, in the Second Essay (1859) 33 —and criticisms.

James explicitly used Renouvier’s own example of the person who thinks of getting out of bed, and then instantly gets out of bed, without any intermediary representation or act, and offered the general law: “anywhere and everywhere the sole known cause for the execution of a movement is the bare idea of the movement’s execution” (EPs 1888, 221). So far, both men clearly agreed: most of the representations of the Will were mythological and misleading. Still, James, in Renouvier’s eyes, conceded too much to the “new psychology” and to the psycho-physiological scheme, threatening the distinction between mere reactive movements and original “acts” of consciousness. Renouvier suspected that, once the reflex act scheme was generalized, James could be read as denying consciousness a real initiative power. James resisted the charge: the will chooses between equipossible reactions that would lead to different results. This called for a new account of consciousness, perhaps less likely to be shared by Renouvier:

We only have to admit that the consciousness which accompanies material processes can react in such a way that it adds at leisure to the intensity or the duration of some particular processes; a field of selection opens at once, which leads us far away from mere mechanical determination. (Renouvier, in EPs 1888, 238; my translation)

For Renouvier, this would mean both maintaining the reflex act scheme and reintroducing an unspecified entity able to “act” on these processes. Still, this left room for a variety of conceptions of consciousness. 34 James, in later texts, would maintain a phenomenist reading of it in his Essays in Radical Empiricism , in connection with the problem of novelty (ERE 1912, 93, n.). If the dispute over the will was perhaps a temporary misunderstanding, Renouvier’s doubts about physiological arguments were clear, and James’s own doubts about Renouvier’s treatment of perception, the categories, and consciousness would be still clearer.

Unbounded Spaces

Even in the early 1880s, James and Renouvier were not in a master/disciple relation anymore. The year before they met, James had lectured on Renouvier’s Essays at Harvard (1879–1880), and this experience certainly led him to reassess their relationship. He then realized that Renouvier’s “exposition offer[ed] too many difficulties” (CWJ 1880, 5.84), a diagnosis confirmed by a letter to Renouvier confessing that this course had left him “more unsettled than [he had been] for years” (CWJ 1880, 5.98). One of the main reasons for this statement was his difficulty explaining to his students Renouvier’s denial of the infinite, that is, his finitism concerning time and space, as is witnessed by an eighteen-point letter to Renouvier on that topic (CWJ 1880, 5.75–79). The questions were soon followed by a lengthy answer ( Perry 1935b , 310–318), which, according to James’s confession, “fail[ed] to awaken conviction” (CWJ 1880, 5.98). One might easily miss the importance of this exchange because fundamental arguments are mixed with more parochial discussions. The exchange is crucial though, since it involves the nature of the second claim regarding phenomenism.

On the surface, the discussion seems to be a long misunderstanding on the very principle of neocriticism: James seems to oppose time and space “in themselves,” or in se , to the infinity of the forms of time and space. He allows that an actual infinity of composition or division is contradictory, as far as our representations are considered (thus granting Renouvier’s third claim about the principe du nombre ), but holds that this does not imply that times and spaces are “unreal”: “to me the forms seem as real, as actual, as ‘given,’ as the phenomena” (CWJ 1880, 5.75).

This opened an easy line for Renouvier to answer that they were “real” as intuitions, but that since we could not make sense of an actual infinite, whether spatial or temporal, and since these forms implied an infinite divisibility as well as infinite additions, they could not be “real,” except as representations (or “as reality of the law of intuition and as reality of the application of this law to all sentient beings”, Perry 1935b , 312). The reasoning seems to be the following: we can only perceive parts of time and space; as “given” parts they imply a whole (if they are given, the whole is given and conversely), and this whole cannot be actually infinite; ergo time and space are unreal in se , they are only “represented” or a “process of the imagination.” The principle of number and the principle of totality are just two names for the same thing here:

The number is the essence of space and time, in the sense that the spaces and durations determined by the setting of limits form numbers (the whole body of mathematical sciences is proof of this) and that the assumption of these circumscribed and numerable parts is indissolubly linked to any empirical use of representations of phenomena in space and time. Without the thought of such numbers (an hour, a sidereal day, a cubic meter, the terrestrial sphere, etc.), we cannot say that we actually perceive phenomena in space and time, nor consequently space and time themselves. That said, I would add: if the subject-matter ( material ) of space and time considered in itself does not have parts in itself that correspond to these measurable constituencies and their indefinite multiplication, I no longer understand what is called being in itself; because the existence that intuition lends to space and time seems to me to be the very existence of such parts; so that if I want space and time to exist in themselves, I must want these parts to exist as well. Otherwise, please tell me what this in itself means. This in itself is in my opinion only the obscure and useless personification of my intuition considered in a vague state. ( Perry 1935b , 313–314)

James’s reply, if clumsy since he still uses the “in themselves” talk, is a criticism of Renouvier’s assumptions. First, he sides with Hodgson’s Time and Space . Number applies only to the adventitious marks our attention applies to times and spaces: “Number, depending thus on limits, is not of the essence of Time or Space” (CWJ 1880, 5.76). Second, James holds that there’s no reason why given spaces might not be “continuous,” this continuity being a “condition,” or a “ground,” for the actual divisions we draw, which will always be finite in number: “These parts of course so far as they are determined by limits actually set, are always in finite number” (CWJ 1880, 5.76). But the most strategic move is the third: he also draws a distinction between unboundedness , which he considers as a property of given times and spaces, and infinity. In other words, we can perfectly well consider spaces and times as unbounded without considering them as infinite, as implying the notion of an impossible infinite actual totality.

Regarding these times and spaces, the very problem of givenness seems to be the bone of contention between the two men. James remarks that the ambiguity lies in the phrase, times and spaces “don’t exist as wholes”: “‘they don’t exist as wholes’ sounds equivalent to ‘they don’t wholly exist’ or ‘are not wholly given’” (CWJ 1880, 5.77). He would allow the first statement (they are not wholes understood as a complete collection of parts) without allowing the conclusion: “The not may negate the given or it may negate the wholly . In the former case we mean: They are wholes, but not given. In the latter they are given, but not wholes” (ibid.). James clearly attributes the first meaning to Renouvier, and endorses the second. 35

The importance of this discussion might be obscured by the apparent subject matter of the discussion, the unbounded past, or the unbounded universe, but there are reasons to think that James has a more general agenda in mind. In 1879, James had published “The Spatial Quale” (EPs 1879, 62–82) 36 (a text he does not mention in his correspondence to Renouvier), and if his explicit targets were Cabot and Spencer as well as Helmholtz, his claims would equally apply to Renouvier. In a line that would be amplified in the Principles , James criticizes the idea that space “forms a system of relations, … [and so] cannot be given in any one sensation,” and “that it is a symbol of the general relatedness of objects constructed by thought from data which lie below consciousness.” His own claim, in that paper, was exactly to argue that we perceive continua, or, in other terms, that “this quality of extension or spatial quale” exists “at the outset [of perception] in a simple and unitary form.” Of course, there will be parts, relations, syntheses of positions, but they belong to a later stage: “The positions which ultimately come to be determined within it, in mutual relation to each other, are later developments of experience, guided by attention.” Spaces and times are thus given, and they are given in the same way other phenomena are given: “this vague original consciousness of a space in which separate positions and directions have not, as yet, been mentally discriminated, deserves, if it exists at all, the name of sensation quite as much as does the color, ‘blue,’ or the feeling, ‘warm.’” (For more on James’s account of spatial perception, see Hatfield , this volume). 37

The broader question of whether the principe du nombre was sound at all remained an open question in James’s thought, and for a long time indeed. James seemed later to entertain serious doubts over Renouvier’s account of the infinite, especially after he became aware of the new mathematical theories on that topic. 38 But the main lesson should be that in this correspondence emerges a major source of disagreement, and that the disagreement involves the neocriticist position concerning time and space. Renouvier objected thus to an important psychological and philosophical Jamesian thesis, and this sentence about James’s papers on space, amplifying the lessons of the “Spatial Quale”, in a letter of 1887, summarizes his general attitude during the last years of their correspondence: “My Kantian habits of mind make this reading and the understanding of your processes of thought and your language more difficult than I should like.” 39

Another bone of contention involved the role of conceptual categories . The major event is the controversy between Hodgson and Renouvier. Its episodes are (1) Hodgson’s criticisms of Renouvier’s Essais in the columns of Mind ( Hodgson 1881a ), (2) the translation of these criticisms in the Critique , with comments by Renouvier ( Hodgson 1881b ), (3) Renouvier’s analysis of Hodgson’s Philosophy of Reflection ( Renouvier 1882–1883 ), and (4) Hodgson’s replies ( Hodgson 1882 ). This discussion would deserve further research, as it certainly recapitulates some major controversies of the time. Both men were phenomenists and shared an interest in epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, 40 but confronted each other on major issues: Renouvier defended free will and the role of conceptual categories against Hodgson; Hodgson defended universal determinism and the infinite against Renouvier.

James paid acute attention to this dispute and its overall effect upon him is interesting. On the one hand, he seems to have been confirmed in his high opinion of Renouvier as a major philosopher, worthy of such a charge by Hodgson. 41 He also still seemed to share Renouvier’s arguments in favor of free will. 42 On the other hand, Renouvier’s Kantianism as regards categories came under Hodgson’s attack, both in Mind and in his “Replies” in the Critique . Since James was then arguing against Kantian approaches to perception, 43 he would likely have agreed with Hodgson’s criticisms here. Hodgson, in his long comments on Renouvier in Mind , remarked that Renouvier seemed to obliterate the distinction between perception and thought, and Kant’s distinction between transcendental aesthetics and transcendental logic:

Time and Space too, it will be observed, which are Kant’s forms of perception or intuition as opposed to thought, are here made moments of the two categories, position and succession. The effect of this is, first, to obliterate the distinction between perception and thought, at least as a cardinal distinction of the analysis, by sinking them in one single class of phenomena, representation; and secondly, to subordinate the forms of perception to those of thought (and not vice versa), by making the forms of that single class of phenomena, in which the distinction is obliterated, the ultimate laws of consciousness, in which the forms of perception as such are comparatively insignificant moment. ( Hodgson 1881a , 38).

That was the published version. In correspondence with James, Hodgson even claimed that Renouvier had retained the worst part of Kant’s philosophy:

He makes just the same mistake that Kant made, namely, to assume a spiritual agent working in certain indispensable forms of thought … I class him with the German Cognition-theorists; his system is a French Erkenntnistheorie ; neither psychology nor philosophy but a Mittelding , half science half philosophy. 44

This was precisely the position of the “psycho-mythologists” James was trying to undermine in the field of psychology (see PP 1890, 520). James felt that there was no need for any “Kantian machine-shop” to explain the articulation of experience, and Hodgson’s warnings about Renouvier, “who starts with a list of conceptual categories as his ultimates and basis [ sic ] of experience,” 45 certainly reinforced the doubts he had started raising in the correspondence over the principe du nombre .

If that is true, the consequence is that, already in 1881, James had reason to think that Renouvier’s second claim, about phenomenism, had to be revised. It had to be revised precisely because he was not ready to accept all the aspects of the first, methodological and Kantian, claim. 46 Later comments by James upon Renouvier 47 confirm that point. Reading the Principles of Nature , James would now regret the “strenuous abstractness of Renouvier’s terms” (ECR 1893: 440). He would still portray Renouvier as the main opponent of the neo-Hegelian monists, as he had done in the late 1870s, 48 sometimes venturing into prophecy: “the present reviewer feels like saying that the philosophy of the future will have to be that either of Renouvier or of Hegel” (ECR 1893, 441). Still, the same James would confess to Royce that “Renouvier cannot be true – his world is so much dust,” 49 and to Peirce that his “form” was “atrocious.” 50 In a letter to Flournoy, James gave a more balanced reading of Renouvier as a “classical” philosopher: “I entirely agree that Renouvier’s system fails to satisfy, but it seems to me the classical and consistent expression of one of the great attitudes, that of insisting on logically intelligible formulas. If one goes beyond, one must abandon the hope of formulas altogether” (CWJ 1892, 7.317–318). One might wonder, though, if that was still a compliment.

The Stream of Thought

The last major difference between James and Renouvier concerns the continuity of consciousness . It provides the substance of Chapter 9 of the 1890 Principles , but it had already been developed in “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology” ( James 1884 ), where James famously claimed that the stream of thought is continuous. This is crucial for James’s account of mind as well as for his methods in psychology, since the confusion between the clear-cut concepts the analyst introduces in the context of a theory and the actual “vague” mental states analyzed is what James dubs the “Psychologist’s Fallacy” (see PP, 911). Renouvier, commenting on “On Some Omissions,” made it clear that he could not accept James’s statements about the “stream” and about its continuity. His objection was a Kantian one, insofar as to him a rational approach to the human psychical life was possible only after we have “grouped” them under categories:

The human, psychical function, is rational only by virtue of groupings of phenomena under different categorical functions, which bring order and classification into the manifold of these impressions and ideas – forming, as they do, an apparent infinity. There, it seems to me, are the file-leaders which guide the sensible phenomena, as they are the stakes and surveyor’s marks for the understanding. How can we classify and create science in psychology, without recognizing an intellectual basis for such general terms as where, who, when, what, for what, by what, etc. ? 51

Basically, Renouvier’s objection was to challenge James’s own point of departure, which claimed to make the stream of thought, or consciousness, itself carry these accents: the who , the what , the where . For Renouvier, this amounts to saying that consciousness is what we can know about it, and that what we can know about it is already structured, like all phenomena, by categories. In contrast, James wished to defend the primacy and the continuity of the stream of consciousness:

You accuse me of bringing To apeiron into the mind, whose functions are essentially discrete. The categoric concepts you speak of are concepts of objects. … But before it is reflected on, consciousness is felt , and as such is continuous, that is, potentially allows us to make sections anywhere in it, and treat the included portion as a unit. … But as we divide them arbitrarily, so I say our divisions of consciousness are arbitrary results of conceptual handling of it on our part. The ordinary psychology, on the contrary, insists that it is naturally discrete and that the divisions belong in certain places. This seems to me like saying that space exists in cubes or pyramids, apart from our construction. 52

This time, the disagreement was not local anymore. It involved a major Jamesian thesis, and certainly not one he was ready to disown.

Conclusions

Like all relationships, the one between James and Renouvier is not univocal. It had different effects on each person, and it cannot be limited to moments of reciprocal welcome and inspiration. There is a naturalistic, evolutionist dimension in James. There is also a fundamental thesis concerning the primacy of the continuous and even of the vague—the analysis being, so to speak, always second. Both go against the fundamental presuppositions of Renouvier.

From a Renouvieran standpoint, The Will to Believe papers seemed compatible with the philosophical programme of La Critique Philosophique , and this also holds for some parts of the papers on the will. But major Jamesian arguments, involving his methodology, his views on the stream of consciousness, and on the import of physiological processes in psychology, would have to be dismissed or revised. There is a massive influence on the will to believe doctrine, but to attribute such an influence, whether we call it idealist or neo-Kantian , on James’s empiricism in general, and even on his pragmatism, would be to seriously disregard his sharp criticisms of Renouvier’s first and second claims.

In other words, if we were to limit James to what appears in the columns of the Critique , or to what he borrows from Renouvier, we would have a James before he became himself, before he became the distinctive empiricist he was. My argument, here, has been that he perceived this danger very early in his exchanges with Renouvier and that by around 1880 he had taken all he needed from Renouvier: the core of The Will to Believe . If James—although less and less frequently—still read Renouvier’s volumes, most of what he could use of Renouvier’s insights had already been captured. It is no accident if, mentioning a possible summer stay with Renouvier and the Pillons, as early as 1883, he was prone to affirm his own philosophical independence:

Philosophers must part, as soon as they have extracted each other’s juice; that is, if they are each working on his own line there inevitably comes a day when they have gone as far together as they can ever go, & after that it is nothing but the accentuation & rubbing in differences, without change. 53

That certainly is a striking description of what we might call “philosophical vampirism.” It is also definitely an accurate account of the James-Renouvier relationship.

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The present chapter builds on historical research and reconstructions in ( Girel 2007 ), to which the reader is referred. There I tried to give a fine-grained, extensive, and historical assessment of James’s relationship not only to Renouvier but also to his disciples, Pillon and Dauriac. The present chapter covers new ground by focusing on Renouvier’s neo-Kantianism.

See Richardson (2006 , 120–121), Gunnarsson (2010) .

See, already in 1879, Hall’s claim: “the philosophical stand-point of Dr. James is essentially that of the modified neo-Kantianism of Renouvier” ( Hall 1879 , 97).

See O’Connell 1997 , Viney 1997 , Dunham 2015 . Fedi (1998) is an outstanding monograph on Renouvier’s epistemology and has many mentions of James. See also Carrette (2013 , 173–174 and esp. p. 120 on James, Renouvier, and individuality); Croce (2017 , 308n.). On Renouvier’s philosophy of science, see Amet 2015 ; Schmaus 2007 , 2018 , 2020 .

I am thus bracketing two dimensions here: (1) the building of radical empiricism, of pragmatism as a method and James’s mature view on pluralism, on the one hand, and (2) Renouvier’s own evolution, including his late views on monadology and personalism, on the other hand.

As quoted in Perry (1948 , 121). The reference goes to Renouvier 1859 . This second essay would be later retitled Psychologie rationnelle in the 1875 edition.

Charles Renouvier to William James, Aug 21, 1879 ( Perry 1929 , 2); translated in Perry 1935a (1, 669). When a letter is calendared in CWJ, I am using the edition of the James-Renouvier correspondence provided by Perry in Perry (1929) , completed with Perry (1935b) . When a translation from the French is available either in CWJ or in Perry 1935a , I use it. All other translations (from Perry 1935b ) are mine.

Charles Renouvier to William James, Sept 5, 1882 ( Perry 1929 , 24); translated in Perry (1935a , 1, 679, slightly edited). Italics are Renouvier’s.

On this, Kuklick 1977 is still a precious resource.

See a later description at CWJ 1884, 5.503: “A philosopher armed from head to foot with all the implements of his profession.”

These ideas are currently an interesting subject of controversy among pragmatists. See, for another view, highly critical of the “Kantian Pragmatism” thesis, Maddalena 2015 .

Carlson identifies, as the core of this revised Kantianism, “the search to establish what are the most reasonable philosophical views for us to hold through examination of our nature as autonomous rational individuals” ( Carlson 1997 , 382). See also Ferrari 2014 .

See Renouvier 1869 , 94–102 in particular.

Fedi has an interesting list of some of the most important differences, as seen by Renouvier ( Fedi 1998 , 14). Renouvier left an unpublished manuscript, on the “Critique of Kant’s doctrine”, which summarized his late views; see Renouvier 1906 .

On this, see Viney 1997 . Lequier is sometimes spelled “Lequyer.”

Renouvier (1859 , 371). Renouvier disapproved of Lequier’s Catholicism, and is more explicit still in the second edition of this Essay.

See Renouvier (1875 , I, 1, xv). In October 1868 James had already clearly perceived that Renouvier took “his stand on Kant.” In the same letter, James’s first on Renouvier, he also noted that he had just “begun” reading the first Critique (CWJ 1868, 4.342). By then James had already read the Prolegomena and the Anthropology , as well as Cousin on Kant (CWJ 1868, 4.298–299).

For a short presentation, including a comparison with phenomenology, see Dupont (2014 , 20). On Renouvier’s phenomenism and his criticism of the notion of “substance,” see the detailed analysis of Fedi (1998 , 338–380).

In the Essais , the list is the following (in order): “Relation, Number, Position, Succession, Quality, Change ( devenir) , Causality, Finality/Purpose ( finalité ), Personality” (see Fedi 1998 , 104). See also Renouvier (1859 , iv–v).

On Renouvier and neo-Kantianism, see Ferrari 2003 .

“It is Faith, that voluntary reposing on the views naturally presenting themselves to us, because through these views only we can fulfil our destiny; which approves of knowledge and raises to certainty and conviction that which without it might be mere delusion. It is no knowledge, but a resolution of the will to admit this knowledge” ( Fichte 1846 , 73).

“Renouvier’s Contribution to La Critique Philosophique, ” in ECR 1873, 265–267.

Perry 1929 , 6, Jul 17, 1876.

Perry 1929 , 7, Jul 29, 1876.

William James to Renouvier (CWJ 1876, 4.541).

“To talk of freedom in the Critique Philosophique is to carry gold to California” (EPh 1878, 338).

James’s thoughts are deemed to “conform to the criticist method and we would be glad to sign them” [ nous nous estimerions heureux de pouvoir les signer ], quoted at (EPh 1878, 31).

For example, in the original text of the essay “Dilemma of Determinism” James wrote: “I am in duty bound to say that my own reasonings are almost entirely those of Renouvier, and may be found in his Psychologie Rationnelle , as well as in the periodical Critique Philosophique , passim ” (WB, 268 n.).

I give a more detailed list in Girel (2007) .

See in particular Renouvier 1885–1886, 176–185, 280–283, 320–324.

William James to Renouvier (CWJ 1896, 8.179). See also James’s attempts, in 1900, to have Renouvier elected as a foreign correspondent for the Berlin Academy of Science (CWJ 1900, 9.224).

Charles Renouvier to William James (CWJ 1878, 5.7–8); my translation for the lines not translated by Perry, who gives only part of the letter in Perry 1935a , vol. 1, 667.

As early as “The Feeling of Effort” (1880), translated in the Critique Philosophique the same year as “Le Sentiment de l’effort,” James claimed that Renouvier’s “account of the psychology of volition was the firmest, and in [his] opinion, the truest connected treatment yet given to the subject” (EPs 1880, 109).

See Klein, Forthcoming .

The same line of argument surfaces, much later, in SPP (1911, 84).

All quotes in this paragraph are from EPs 1888 (62–65).

See also Klein (2009) .

“The new infinitists have disproved the contention of Renouvier et al . that the realization of a cardinal infinite is impossible . They may have proved it possible. They haven’t yet proved it actual” (Fragment on the Infinite, 1902–1910), MEN 217.

Charles Renouvier to William James, March 27, 1887, Perry 1929 , 211–212; translated in Perry 1935a , 1, 701.

See (CWJ 1879, 5.43–44). Hodgson, contrariwise to Renouvier, did not admit that the denial of free will involved the denial of moral distinctions between right or wrong.

CWJ 1880, 5.109, to Alice Howe Gibbens James.

CWJ 1883, 5.396. See also an interesting letter by Hodgson (CWJ 1882, 5.199).

See Girel (2003 , §1).

Shadworth Hodgson to William James (CWJ 1882, 5.276).

Shadworth Hodgson to William James (CWJ 1886, 6.120).

That is the main reason why I have doubts about the label “idealist” when applied globally to James. Dunham, in his fine piece on Renouvier and James, has the following characterization as applied to Renouvier: “he was an idealist insofar as he believed that: (i) our mental ideas are the exemplars of the ‘really real’; (ii) reality is exclusively experiential in nature; and (iii) our experience is shaped or organized by the intellect” ( Dunham 2015 , 4). Item (ii) is of course shared by James, but regarding (i), which Dunham later describes as “the point of view of knowledge”, the whole point of most of James’s Principles period is to criticize the vocabulary of ideas, and it includes a sharp criticism of (iii) as well (which is not addressed in Dunham’s paper).

James’s review of Les Principes de la nature , 2nd ed., by Charles Renouvier, can be found at (ECR 1893, 440–446). See also James’s 1892 review of L’Année Philosophique, 2e année, ed. by François Pillon, at (ECR 1892, 426–432).

See (CWJ 1879, 5.48): “This [Hegelian] school and that of Renouvier are the only serious alternatives today.”

William James to J. Royce (CWJ 1892, 7.351).

William James to C. S. Peirce (CWJ 1897, 8.324).

Charles Renouvier to William James ( Perry 1929 , 204); translated in Perry 1935a , 1.697.

William James to Charles Renouvier, Sept 30, 1884, ( Perry 1929 , 206); translation in EPs, 403.

William James to Alice Howe Gibbens James, (CWJ 1883, 5.410).

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Eternal Dilemmas and Divergent Beliefs: Charles Renouvier's Agonistic History of Philosophy

2023, in: Intellectual History Review, online first 2022; vol. 33, no. 2

This article canvasses the model of history of philosophy developed by the French philosopher Charles Renouvier in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such a model rested on a precise assumption: the entire history of philosophy would be nothing more than the diachronic embodiment of sets of contradictory conceptual pairs, which Renouvier calls "dilemmas" and whose solution would only be practical. The aim of this article is not only to lay out the distinctive traits of Renouvier's history of philosophy, but also to highlight the militant nature of his historiography. In fact, the theory of dilemmas was pitted against the historiographical model that was dominant in Renouvier's formative years, namely the eclectic spiritualism of Victor Cousin, who rather sought to distil from each philosophical system its truth content. In this context, the history of philosophy, far from being the philological discipline it is for us today, has in fact a primarily instrumental and polemical, if not political, value.

Related Papers

in: History of European Ideas, vol. 46, no. 6

Pietro Terzi

Like other philosophical traditions, what we call French spiritualism is a complicated constellation of thinkers who developed partially divergent answers to shared themes or concerns. In order to avoid easy generalizations and artificial labels, this article aims to explore the many-voiced character of this tradition by focusing on a debate on the notion of 'liberté morale' that took place in 1903 at the Société française de philosophie. Given the number and the calibre of the participants, as well as the centrality of the discussed notion, this episode sets the perfect stage for an in-situ assessment of the inner fault lines underlying any superficial unity in the French spiritualist tradition.

Giuseppe Bianco

Despite the success of the term “problem,” which is tightly linked to the term “concept,” almost no scholar has analysed its history. This essay tries to fill that lack, focusing on the period beginning in late modernity through the 1960s, by analysing the strategies employed by different agents to define “philosophical” problems, or “philosophical” ways of posing problems. The term “problem,” originally used in Antiquity by knowledge-producers located in an autonomous position, implied a model of cognition oscillating between production and reproduction, between pragmatic and representative models, either dominated by the hand or the eye. Once the term escaped the context of geometry, it was involved in symbolic fights that became ever more radical during Modernity. By defining the human mind and its different modalities of problem-solving and by pacifying disagreements, a group of knowledge producers, the “philosophers,” placed themselves in a supposingly neutral position, which they have used since then to fiercely defend themselves from attacks from rivals. The anamnesis of the geographic and disciplinary migrations of the term “problem,” its translations and semantic mutations, is a tool to explain today’s conflicts, symptoms of philosophy’s disciplinary unconscious.

in The Oxford Handbook of Modern French Philosophy, Mark Sinclair and Daniel Whistler eds., Oxford : Oxford University Press

Delphine Antoine-Mahut

Although it has been promoted within a philosophical tradition since Antiquity, one which, in the 18 th century, came to designate the free-thinking characteristic of the Enlightenment, eclecticism has been severely criticised since Victor Cousin's reinstatement of it in 19 th-century France. This article returns to 19 th-century French eclecticism and to its polemical interactions with its opponents in order to explain why the eclectic method, which was supposed to serve the new 'spiritualist' philosophy, served to make 19 th-century French philosophy a kind of philosophical no-man's-land between British "empiricism" and German "idealism". In this way, the article seeks to reveal what eclecticism is likely to teach us about our practices as historians of philosophy today, in spite of Cousin but also thanks to him.

in: Modern Intellectual History, vol. 17, no. 4

This article widens the scope of the history of Hegel’s reception in turn-of-the-century French philosophy by thematizing an often neglected moment, namely the years 1897 to 1927. Before the so-called “Hegel-Renaissance,” in fact, the Hegelian dialectics was generally understood as a “panlogist” doctrine aimed at dissolving the concrete individual in the abstract dimension of the concept or in the all-encompassing realm of Absolute Spirit. However, even at the beginning of the century attempts were made to provide a more positive assessment of Hegelian philosophy. The author reconstructs this panlogist controversy by analysing the points of view of some prominent philosophers of the time, namely Charles Renouvier, René Berthelot, Émile Boutroux, Émile Meyerson and Léon Brunschvicg. The aim of the article is to provide a deeper understanding of the historical continuities and discontinuities characterizing Hegel’s reception in France.

Sebastian Luft , Capeilleres Fabien

Christopher E Forth

British journal for the history of philosophy

Henri Bergson (1859-1940), the most prominent member of the nineteenth- century French spiritualist tradition, is the first philosopher who explicitly defined philosophy as a practice consisting in posing problems anew and in creating concepts. In this essay I will try to reconstruct the progressive importance acquired by the terms ‘problem’ and ‘concept’ in nineteenth-century French philosophy and how they combined in Bergson’s theories about creativity, invention and novelty. I will argue that Bergson’s conception of philosophy as a creative intellectual practice was the result of a negotiation, inside a pre-existing spiritualist framework, between neo-Kantianism and evolutionism, which strongly influenced empirical psychology and the emerging social sciences; Bergson’s solution, influenced by the evolution of mathematics and literary theory, was just one of the possible options, and the main alternative to a new form of transcendental philosophy. This idea of philosophy as creation of concepts, is ideological insofar it was both anachronistic and a tool used in order to legitimate a type of practice that was under attack at that moment. Although it was a ‘French ideology,’ we can find similar positions in Germany at the same moment, especially in Nietzsche and in the so-called ‘philosophies of life’

Delphine ANTOINE-MAHUT, ‘The « Empowered King » of French Spiritualism : Théodore Jouffroy’. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Special Issue on ‘French Spiritualism and its Critics’, D. Antoine-Mahut and M. Sinclair eds., forthcoming in 2020 (accepted article, ID : BJHP-2019-0327.R2.).

There is a paradox in the fate of 19th century French philosophy: the 'eclecticism' or 'spiritualism' that was university philosophy, and that was championed by Victor Cousin, 'the king of the philosophers', the commander of a 'regiment' of other teacher-philosophers docilely disseminating his doctrine, is almost entirely absent from today's canon. Between the familiar figures of Maine de Biran and Bergson, the work of Comte or Tocqueville might be taught and studied but that of Cousin and those he absorbed into his ranks is ignored. This article turns back to the regiment. By showing how certain spiritualists attempted to philosophically distinguish themselves from their commander, it considers spiritualism as a school developing a programme rather than as a school of (one track) thought. From this perspective, the case of Théodore Jouffroy is of particular interest, since he started by sharing with the young Cousin a philosophical programme aiming to found scientifically new forms of psychology. However, he evolved in a radically different direction to Cousin. By looking at Jouffroy as an 'emancipated king of philosophy', I intend to return to the philosophical rather than simply political meaning of 'French spiritualism'.

Cartesian Mind, London, Routledge. (Routledge Philosophical Minds)

In this essay, I will retrace the principal steps and modalities of these grounding philosophical narratives that make use of the figure of Descartes. I will then discuss, in conclusion, their principal historiographical and philosophical stakes.

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The term “free will” has emerged over the past two millennia as the canonical designator for a significant kind of control over one’s actions. Questions concerning the nature and existence of this kind of control (e.g., does it require and do we have the freedom to do otherwise or the power of self-determination?), and what its true significance is (is it necessary for moral responsibility or human dignity?) have been taken up in every period of Western philosophy and by many of the most important philosophical figures, such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant. (We cannot undertake here a review of related discussions in other philosophical traditions. For a start, the reader may consult Marchal and Wenzel 2017 and Chakrabarti 2017 for overviews of thought on free will, broadly construed, in Chinese and Indian philosophical traditions, respectively.) In this way, it should be clear that disputes about free will ineluctably involve disputes about metaphysics and ethics. In ferreting out the kind of control at stake in free will, we are forced to consider questions about (among others) causation, laws of nature, time, substance, ontological reduction vs emergence, the relationship of causal and reasons-based explanations, the nature of motivation and more generally of human persons. In assessing the significance of free will, we are forced to consider questions about (among others) rightness and wrongness, good and evil, virtue and vice, blame and praise, reward and punishment, and desert. The topic of free will also gives rise to purely empirical questions that are beginning to be explored in the human sciences: do we have it, and to what degree?

Here is an overview of what follows. In Section 1 , we acquaint the reader with some central historical contributions to our understanding of free will. (As nearly every major and minor figure had something to say about it, we cannot begin to cover them all.) As with contributions to many other foundational topics, these ideas are not of ‘merely historical interest’: present-day philosophers continue to find themselves drawn back to certain thinkers as they freshly engage their contemporaries. In Section 2 , we map the complex architecture of the contemporary discussion of the nature of free will by dividing it into five subtopics: its relation to moral responsibility; the proper analysis of the freedom to do otherwise; a powerful, recent argument that the freedom to do otherwise (at least in one important sense) is not necessary for moral responsibility; ‘compatibilist’ accounts of sourcehood or self-determination; and ‘incompatibilist’ or ‘libertarian’ accounts of source and self-determination. In Section 3 , we consider arguments from experience, a priori reflection, and various scientific findings and theories for and against the thesis that human beings have free will, along with the related question of whether it is reasonable to believe that we have it. Finally, in Section 4 , we survey the long-debated questions involving free will that arise in classical theistic metaphysics.

1.1 Ancient and Medieval Period

1.2 modern period and twentieth century, 2.1 free will and moral responsibility, 2.2 the freedom to do otherwise, 2.3 freedom to do otherwise vs. sourcehood accounts, 2.4 compatibilist accounts of sourcehood, 2.5 libertarian accounts of sourcehood, 3.1 arguments against the reality of free will, 3.2 arguments for the reality of free will, 4.1 free will and god’s power, knowledge, and goodness, 4.2 god’s freedom, other internet resources, related entries, 1. major historical contributions.

One finds scholarly debate on the ‘origin’ of the notion of free will in Western philosophy. (See, e.g., Dihle (1982) and, in response Frede (2011), with Dihle finding it in St. Augustine (354–430 CE) and Frede in the Stoic Epictetus (c. 55–c. 135 CE).) But this debate presupposes a fairly particular and highly conceptualized concept of free will, with Dihle’s later ‘origin’ reflecting his having a yet more particular concept in view than Frede. If, instead, we look more generally for philosophical reflection on choice-directed control over one’s own actions, then we find significant discussion in Plato and Aristotle (cf. Irwin 1992). Indeed, on this matter, as with so many other major philosophical issues, Plato and Aristotle give importantly different emphases that inform much subsequent thought.

In Book IV of The Republic , Plato posits rational, spirited, and appetitive aspects to the human soul. The wise person strives for inner ‘justice’, a condition in which each part of the soul plays its proper role—reason as the guide, the spirited nature as the ally of reason, exhorting oneself to do what reason deems proper, and the passions as subjugated to the determinations of reason. In the absence of justice, the individual is enslaved to the passions. Hence, freedom for Plato is a kind of self-mastery, attained by developing the virtues of wisdom, courage, and temperance, resulting in one’s liberation from the tyranny of base desires and acquisition of a more accurate understanding and resolute pursuit of the Good (Hecht 2014).

While Aristotle shares with Plato a concern for cultivating virtues, he gives greater theoretical attention to the role of choice in initiating individual actions which, over time, result in habits, for good or ill. In Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle says that, unlike nonrational agents, we have the power to do or not to do, and much of what we do is voluntary, such that its origin is ‘in us’ and we are ‘aware of the particular circumstances of the action’. Furthermore, mature humans make choices after deliberating about different available means to our ends, drawing on rational principles of action. Choose consistently well (poorly), and a virtuous (vicious) character will form over time, and it is in our power to be either virtuous or vicious.

A question that Aristotle seems to recognize, while not satisfactorily answering, is whether the choice an individual makes on any given occasion is wholly determined by his internal state—perception of his circumstances and his relevant beliefs, desires, and general character dispositions (wherever on the continuum between virtue and vice he may be)—and external circumstances. He says that “the man is the father of his actions as of children”—that is, a person’s character shapes how she acts. One might worry that this seems to entail that the person could not have done otherwise—at the moment of choice, she has no control over what her present character is—and so she is not responsible for choosing as she does. Aristotle responds by contending that her present character is partly a result of previous choices she made. While this claim is plausible enough, it seems to ‘pass the buck’, since ‘the man is the father’ of those earlier choices and actions, too.

We note just a few contributions of the subsequent centuries of the Hellenistic era. (See Bobzien 1998.) This period was dominated by debates between Epicureans, Stoics, and the Academic Skeptics, and as it concerned freedom of the will, the debate centered on the place of determinism or of fate in governing human actions and lives. The Stoics and the Epicureans believed that all ordinary things, human souls included, are corporeal and governed by natural laws or principles. Stoics believed that all human choice and behavior was causally determined, but held that this was compatible with our actions being ‘up to us’. Chrysippus ably defended this position by contending that your actions are ‘up to you’ when they come about ‘through you’—when the determining factors of your action are not external circumstances compelling you to act as you do but are instead your own choices grounded in your perception of the options before you. Hence, for moral responsibility, the issue is not whether one’s choices are determined (they are) but in what manner they are determined. Epicurus and his followers had a more mechanistic conception of bodily action than the Stoics. They held that all things (human soul included) are constituted by atoms, whose law-governed behavior fixes the behavior of everything made of such atoms. But they rejected determinism by supposing that atoms, though law-governed, are susceptible to slight ‘swerves’ or departures from the usual paths. Epicurus has often been understood as seeking to ground the freedom of human willings in such indeterministic swerves, but this is a matter of controversy. If this understanding of his aim is correct, how he thought that this scheme might work in detail is not known. (What little we know about his views in this matter stem chiefly from the account given in his follower Lucretius’s six-book poem, On the Nature of Things . See Bobzien 2000 for discussion.)

A final notable figure of this period was Alexander of Aphrodisias , the most important Peripatetic commentator on Aristotle. In his On Fate , Alexander sharply criticizes the positions of the Stoics. He goes on to resolve the ambiguity in Aristotle on the question of the determining nature of character on individual choices by maintaining that, given all such shaping factors, it remains open to the person when she acts freely to do or not to do what she in fact does. Many scholars see Alexander as the first unambiguously ‘libertarian’ theorist of the will (for more information about such theories see section 2 below).

Augustine (354–430) is the central bridge between the ancient and medieval eras of philosophy. His mature thinking about the will was influenced by his early encounter with late classical Neoplatonist thought, which is then transformed by the theological views he embraces in his adult Christian conversion, famously recounted in his Confessions . In that work and in the earlier On the Free Choice of the Will , Augustine struggles to draw together into a coherent whole the doctrines that creaturely misuse of freedom, not God, is the source of evil in the world and that the human will has been corrupted through the ‘fall’ from grace of the earliest human beings, necessitating a salvation that is attained entirely through the actions of God, even as it requires, constitutively, an individual’s willed response of faith. The details of Augustine’s positive account remain a matter of controversy. He clearly affirms that the will is by its nature a self-determining power—no powers external to it determine its choice—and that this feature is the basis of its freedom. But he does not explicitly rule out the will’s being internally determined by psychological factors, as Chrysippus held, and Augustine had theological reasons that might favor (as well as others that would oppose) the thesis that all things are determined in some manner by God. Scholars divide on whether Augustine was a libertarian or instead a kind of compatibilist with respect to metaphysical freedom. (Macdonald 1999 and Stump 2006 argue the former, Baker 2003 and Couenhoven 2007 the latter.) It is clear, however, that Augustine thought that we are powerfully shaped by wrongly-ordered desires that can make it impossible for us to wholeheartedly will ends contrary to those desires, for a sustained period of time. This condition entails an absence of something more valuable, ‘true freedom’, in which our wills are aligned with the Good, a freedom that can be attained only by a transformative operation of divine grace. This latter, psychological conception of freedom of will clearly echoes Plato’s notion of the soul’s (possible) inner justice.

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) attempted to synthesize major strands of Aristotle’s systematic philosophy with Christian theology, and so Aquinas begins his complex discussion of human action and choice by agreeing with Aristotle that creatures such as ourselves who are endowed with both intellect and will are hardwired to will certain general ends ordered to the most general goal of goodness. Will is rational desire: we cannot move towards that which does not appear to us at the time to be good. Freedom enters the picture when we consider various means to these ends and move ourselves to activity in pursuit of certain of them. Our will is free in that it is not fixed by nature on any particular means, and they generally do not appear to us either as unqualifiedly good or as uniquely satisfying the end we wish to fulfill. Furthermore, what appears to us to be good can vary widely—even, over time, intra-personally. So much is consistent with saying that in a given total circumstance (including one’s present beliefs and desires), one is necessitated to will as one does. For this reason, some commentators have taken Aquinas to be a kind of compatibilist concerning freedom and causal or theological determinism. In his most extended defense of the thesis that the will is not ‘compelled’ ( DM 6), Aquinas notes three ways that the will might reject an option it sees as attractive: (i) it finds another option more attractive, (ii) it comes to think of some circumstance rendering an alternative more favorable “by some chance circumstance, external or internal”, and (iii) the person is momentarily disposed to find an alternative attractive by virtue of a non-innate state that is subject to the will (e.g., being angry vs being at peace). The first consideration is clearly consistent with compatibilism. The second at best points to a kind of contingency that is not grounded in the activity of the will itself. And one wanting to read Aquinas as a libertarian might worry that his third consideration just passes the buck: even if we do sometimes have an ability to directly modify perception-coloring states such as moods, Aquinas’s account of will as rational desire seems to indicate that we will do so only if it seems to us on balance to be good to do so. Those who read Aquinas as a libertarian point to the following further remark in this text: “Will itself can interfere with the process [of some cause’s moving the will] either by refusing to consider what attracts it to will or by considering its opposite: namely, that there is a bad side to what is being proposed…” (Reply to 15; see also DV 24.2). For discussion, see MacDonald (1998), Stump (2003, ch. 9) and especially Hoffman & Michon (2017), which offers the most comprehensive analysis of relevant texts to date.

John Duns Scotus (1265/66–1308) was the stoutest defender in the medieval era of a strongly libertarian conception of the will, maintaining on introspective grounds that will by its very nature is such that “nothing other than the will is the total cause” of its activity ( QAM ). Indeed, he held the unusual view that not only up to but at the very instant that one is willing X , it is possible for one to will Y or at least not to will X . (He articulates this view through the puzzling claim that a single instant of time comprises two ‘instants of nature’, at the first but not the second of which alternative possibilities are preserved.) In opposition to Aquinas and other medieval Aristotelians, Scotus maintained that a precondition of our freedom is that there are two fundamentally distinct ways things can seem good to us: as practically advantageous to us or as according with justice. Contrary to some popular accounts, however, Scotus allowed that the scope of available alternatives for a person will be more or less constricted. He grants that we are not capable of willing something in which we see no good whatsoever, nor of positively repudiating something which appears to us as unqualifiedly good. However, in accordance with his uncompromising position that nothing can be the total cause of the will other than itself, he held that where something does appear to us as unqualifiedly good (perfectly suited both to our advantage and justice)—viz., in the ‘beatific vision’ of God in the afterlife—we still can refrain from willing it. For discussion, see John Duns Scotus, §5.2 .

The problem of free will was an important topic in the modern period, with all the major figures wading into it (Descartes 1641 [1988], 1644 [1988]; Hobbes 1654 [1999], 1656 [1999]; Spinoza 1677 [1992]; Malebranche 1684 [1993]; Leibniz 1686 [1991]; Locke 1690 [1975]; Hume 1740 [1978], 1748 [1975]; Edwards 1754 [1957]; Kant 1781 [1998], 1785 [1998], 1788 [2015]; Reid 1788 [1969]). After less sustained attention in the 19th Century (most notable were Schopenhauer 1841 [1999] and Nietzsche 1886 [1966]), it was widely discussed again among early twentieth century philosophers (Moore 1912; Hobart 1934; Schlick 1939; Nowell-Smith 1948, 1954; Campbell 1951; Ayer 1954; Smart 1961). The centrality of the problem of free will to the various projects of early modern philosophers can be traced to two widely, though not universally, shared assumptions. The first is that without belief in free will, there would be little reason for us to act morally. More carefully, it was widely assumed that belief in an afterlife in which a just God rewards and punishes us according to our right or wrong use of free will was key to motivating us to be moral (Russell 2008, chs. 16–17). Life before death affords us many examples in which vice is better rewarded than virtue and so without knowledge of a final judgment in the afterlife, we would have little reason to pursue virtue and justice when they depart from self-interest. And without free will there can be no final judgement.

The second widely shared assumption is that free will seems difficult to reconcile with what we know about the world. While this assumption is shared by the majority of early modern philosophers, what specifically it is about the world that seems to conflict with freedom differs from philosopher to philosopher. For some, the worry is primarily theological. How can we make sense of contingency and freedom in a world determined by a God who must choose the best possible world to create? For some, the worry was primarily metaphysical. The principle of sufficient reason—roughly, the idea that every event must have a reason or cause—was a cornerstone of Leibniz’s and Spinoza’s metaphysics. How does contingency and freedom fit into such a world? For some, the worry was primarily scientific (Descartes). Given that a proper understanding of the physical world is one in which all physical objects are governed by deterministic laws of nature, how does contingency and freedom fit into such a world? Of course, for some, all three worries were in play in their work (this is true especially of Leibniz).

Despite many disagreements about how best to solve these worries, there were three claims that were widely, although not universally, agreed upon. The first was that free will has two aspects: the freedom to do otherwise and the power of self-determination. The second is that an adequate account of free will must entail that free agents are morally responsible agents and/or fit subjects for punishment. Ideas about moral responsibility were often a yard stick by which analyses of free will were measured, with critics objecting to an analysis of free will by arguing that agents who satisfied the analysis would not, intuitively, be morally responsible for their actions. The third is that compatibilism—the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism—is true. (Spinoza, Reid, and Kant are the clear exceptions to this, though some also see Descartes as an incompatibilist [Ragland 2006].)

Since a detailed discussion of these philosophers’ accounts of free will would take us too far afield, we want instead to focus on isolating a two-step strategy for defending compatibilism that emerges in the early modern period and continued to exert considerable force into the early twentieth century (and perhaps is still at work today). Advocates of this two-step strategy have come to be known as “classical compatibilists”. The first step was to argue that the contrary of freedom is not determinism but external constraint on doing what one wants to do. For example, Hobbes contends that liberty is “the absence of all the impediments to action that are not contained in the nature and intrinsical quality of the agent” (Hobbes 1654 [1999], 38; cf. Hume 1748 [1975] VIII.1; Edwards 1754 [1957]; Ayer 1954). This idea led many compatibilists, especially the more empiricist-inclined, to develop desire- or preference-based analyses of both the freedom to do otherwise and self-determination. An agent has the freedom to do otherwise than \(\phi\) just in case if she preferred or willed to do otherwise, she would have done otherwise (Hobbes 1654 [1999], 16; Locke 1690 [1975]) II.xx.8; Hume 1748 [1975] VIII.1; Moore 1912; Ayer 1954). The freedom to do otherwise does not require that you are able to act contrary to your strongest motivation but simply that your action be dependent on your strongest motivation in the sense that had you desired something else more strongly, then you would have pursued that alternative end. (We will discuss this analysis in more detail below in section 2.2.) Similarly, an agent self-determines her \(\phi\)-ing just in case \(\phi\) is caused by her strongest desires or preferences at the time of action (Hobbes 1654 [1999]; Locke 1690 [1975]; Edwards 1754 [1957]). (We will discuss this analysis in more detail below in section 2.4.) Given these analyses, determinism seems innocuous to freedom.

The second step was to argue that any attempt to analyze free will in a way that putatively captures a deeper or more robust sense of freedom leads to intractable conundrums. The most important examples of this attempt to capture a deeper sense of freedom in the modern period are Immanuel Kant (1781 [1998], 1785 [1998], 1788 [2015]) and Thomas Reid (1788 [1969]) and in the early twentieth century C. A. Campbell (1951). These philosophers argued that the above compatibilist analyses of the freedom to do otherwise and self-determination are, at best, insufficient for free will, and, at worst, incompatible with it. With respect to the classical compatibilist analysis of the freedom to do otherwise, these critics argued that the freedom to do otherwise requires not just that an agent could have acted differently if he had willed differently, but also that he could have willed differently. Free will requires more than free action. With respect to classical compatibilists’ analysis of self-determination, they argued that self-determination requires that the agent—rather than his desires, preferences, or any other mental state—cause his free choices and actions. Reid explains:

I consider the determination of the will as an effect. This effect must have a cause which had the power to produce it; and the cause must be either the person himself, whose will it is, or some other being…. If the person was the cause of that determination of his own will, he was free in that action, and it is justly imputed to him, whether it be good or bad. But, if another being was the cause of this determination, either producing it immediately, or by means and instruments under his direction, then the determination is the act and deed of that being, and is solely imputed to him. (1788 [1969] IV.i, 265)

Classical compatibilists argued that both claims are incoherent. While it is intelligible to ask whether a man willed to do what he did, it is incoherent to ask whether a man willed to will what he did:

For to ask whether a man is at liberty to will either motion or rest, speaking or silence, which he pleases, is to ask whether a man can will what he wills , or be pleased with what he is pleased with? A question which, I think, needs no answer; and they who make a question of it must suppose one will to determine the acts of another, and another to determine that, and so on in infinitum . (Locke 1690 [1975] II.xx.25; cf. Hobbes 1656 [1999], 72)

In response to libertarians’ claim that self-determination requires that the agent, rather than his motives, cause his actions, it was objected that this removes the agent from the natural causal order, which is clearly unintelligible for human animals (Hobbes 1654 [1999], 38). It is important to recognize that an implication of the second step of the strategy is that free will is not only compatible with determinism but actually requires determinism (cf. Hume 1748 [1975] VIII). This was a widely shared assumption among compatibilists up through the mid-twentieth century.

Spinoza’s Ethics (1677 [1992]) is an important departure from the above dialectic. He endorses a strong form of necessitarianism in which everything is categorically necessary as opposed to the conditional necessity embraced by most compatibilists, and he contends that there is no room in such a world for divine or creaturely free will. Thus, Spinoza is a free will skeptic. Interestingly, Spinoza is also keen to deny that the nonexistence of free will has the dire implications often assumed. As noted above, many in the modern period saw belief in free will and an afterlife in which God rewards the just and punishes the wicked as necessary to motivate us to act morally. According to Spinoza, so far from this being necessary to motivate us to be moral, it actually distorts our pursuit of morality. True moral living, Spinoza thinks, sees virtue as its own reward (Part V, Prop. 42). Moreover, while free will is a chimera, humans are still capable of freedom or self-determination. Such self-determination, which admits of degrees on Spinoza’s view, arises when our emotions are determined by true ideas about the nature of reality. The emotional lives of the free persons are ones in which “we desire nothing but that which must be, nor, in an absolute sense, can we find contentment in anything but truth. And so in so far as we rightly understand these matters, the endeavor of the better part of us is in harmony with the order of the whole of Nature” (Part IV, Appendix). Spinoza is an important forerunner to the many free will skeptics in the twentieth century, a position that continues to attract strong support (see Strawson 1986; Double 1992; Smilansky 2000; Pereboom 2001, 2014; Levy 2011; Waller 2011; Caruso 2012; Vilhauer 2012. For further discussion see the entry skepticism about moral responsibility ).

It is worth observing that in many of these disputes about the nature of free will there is an underlying dispute about the nature of moral responsibility. This is seen clearly in Hobbes (1654 [1999]) and early twentieth century philosophers’ defenses of compatibilism. Underlying the belief that free will is incompatible with determinism is the thought that no one would be morally responsible for any actions in a deterministic world in the sense that no one would deserve blame or punishment. Hobbes responded to this charge in part by endorsing broadly consequentialist justifications of blame and punishment: we are justified in blaming or punishing because these practices deter future harmful actions and/or contribute to reforming the offender (1654 [1999], 24–25; cf. Schlick 1939; Nowell-Smith 1948; Smart 1961). While many, perhaps even most, compatibilists have come to reject this consequentialist approach to moral responsibility in the wake of P. F. Strawson’s 1962 landmark essay ‘Freedom and Resentment’ (though see Vargas (2013) and McGeer (2014) for contemporary defenses of compatibilism that appeal to forward-looking considerations) there is still a general lesson to be learned: disputes about free will are often a function of underlying disputes about the nature and value of moral responsibility.

2. The Nature of Free Will

As should be clear from this short discussion of the history of the idea of free will, free will has traditionally been conceived of as a kind of power to control one’s choices and actions. When an agent exercises free will over her choices and actions, her choices and actions are up to her . But up to her in what sense? As should be clear from our historical survey, two common (and compatible) answers are: (i) up to her in the sense that she is able to choose otherwise, or at minimum that she is able not to choose or act as she does, and (ii) up to her in the sense that she is the source of her action. However, there is widespread controversy both over whether each of these conditions is required for free will and if so, how to understand the kind or sense of freedom to do otherwise or sourcehood that is required. While some seek to resolve these controversies in part by careful articulation of our experiences of deliberation, choice, and action (Nozick 1981, ch. 4; van Inwagen 1983, ch. 1), many seek to resolve these controversies by appealing to the nature of moral responsibility. The idea is that the kind of control or sense of up-to-meness involved in free will is the kind of control or sense of up-to-meness relevant to moral responsibility (Double 1992, 12; Ekstrom 2000, 7–8; Smilansky 2000, 16; Widerker and McKenna 2003, 2; Vargas 2007, 128; Nelkin 2011, 151–52; Levy 2011, 1; Pereboom 2014, 1–2). Indeed, some go so far as to define ‘free will’ as ‘the strongest control condition—whatever that turns out to be—necessary for moral responsibility’ (Wolf 1990, 3–4; Fischer 1994, 3; Mele 2006, 17). Given this connection, we can determine whether the freedom to do otherwise and the power of self-determination are constitutive of free will and, if so, in what sense, by considering what it takes to be a morally responsible agent. On these latter characterizations of free will, understanding free will is inextricably linked to, and perhaps even derivative from, understanding moral responsibility. And even those who demur from this claim regarding conceptual priority typically see a close link between these two ideas. Consequently, to appreciate the current debates surrounding the nature of free will, we need to say something about the nature of moral responsibility.

It is now widely accepted that there are different species of moral responsibility. It is common (though not uncontroversial) to distinguish moral responsibility as answerability from moral responsibility as attributability from moral responsibility as accountability (Watson 1996; Fischer and Tognazzini 2011; Shoemaker 2011. See Smith (2012) for a critique of this taxonomy). These different species of moral responsibility differ along three dimensions: (i) the kind of responses licensed toward the responsible agent, (ii) the nature of the licensing relation, and (iii) the necessary and sufficient conditions for licensing the relevant kind of responses toward the agent. For example, some argue that when an agent is morally responsible in the attributability sense, certain judgments about the agent—such as judgments concerning the virtues and vices of the agent—are fitting , and that the fittingness of such judgments does not depend on whether the agent in question possessed the freedom to do otherwise (cf. Watson 1996).

While keeping this controversy about the nature of moral responsibility firmly in mind (see the entry on moral responsibility for a more detailed discussion of these issues), we think it is fair to say that the most commonly assumed understanding of moral responsibility in the historical and contemporary discussion of the problem of free will is moral responsibility as accountability in something like the following sense:

An agent \(S\) is morally accountable for performing an action \(\phi\) \(=_{df.}\) \(S\) deserves praise if \(\phi\) goes beyond what can be reasonably expected of \(S\) and \(S\) deserves blame if \(\phi\) is morally wrong.

The central notions in this definition are praise , blame , and desert . The majority of contemporary philosophers have followed Strawson (1962) in contending that praising and blaming an agent consist in experiencing (or at least being disposed to experience (cf. Wallace 1994, 70–71)) reactive attitudes or emotions directed toward the agent, such as gratitude, approbation, and pride in the case of praise, and resentment, indignation, and guilt in the case of blame. (See Sher (2006) and Scanlon (2008) for important dissents from this trend. See the entry on blame for a more detailed discussion.) These emotions, in turn, dispose us to act in a variety of ways. For example, blame disposes us to respond with some kind of hostility toward the blameworthy agent, such as verbal rebuke or partial withdrawal of good will. But while these kinds of dispositions are essential to our blaming someone, their manifestation is not: it is possible to blame someone with very little change in attitudes or actions toward the agent. Blaming someone might be immediately followed by forgiveness as an end of the matter.

By ‘desert’, we have in mind what Derk Pereboom has called basic desert :

The desert at issue here is basic in the sense that the agent would deserve to be blamed or praised just because she has performed the action, given an understanding of its moral status, and not, for example, merely by virtue of consequentialist or contractualist considerations. (2014, 2)

As we understand desert, if an agent deserves blame, then we have a strong pro tanto reason to blame him simply in virtue of his being accountable for doing wrong. Importantly, these reasons can be outweighed by other considerations. While an agent may deserve blame, it might, all things considered, be best to forgive him unconditionally instead.

When an agent is morally responsible for doing something wrong, he is blame worthy : he deserves hard treatment marked by resentment and indignation and the actions these emotions dispose us toward, such as censure, rebuke, and ostracism. However, it would seem unfair to treat agents in these ways unless their actions were up to them . Thus, we arrive at the core connection between free will and moral responsibility: agents deserve praise or blame only if their actions are up to them—only if they have free will. Consequently, we can assess analyses of free will by their implications for judgments of moral responsibility. We note that some might reject the claim that free will is necessary for moral responsibility (e.g., Frankfurt 1971; Stump 1988), but even for these theorists an adequate analysis of free will must specify a sufficient condition for the kind of control at play in moral responsibility.

In what follows, we focus our attention on the two most commonly cited features of free will: the freedom to do otherwise and sourcehood. While some seem to think that free will consists exclusively in either the freedom to do otherwise (van Inwagen 2008) or in sourcehood (Zagzebski 2000), many philosophers hold that free will involves both conditions—though philosophers often emphasize one condition over the other depending on their dialectical situation or argumentative purposes (cf. Watson 1987). In what follows, we will describe the most common characterizations of these two conditions.

For most newcomers to the problem of free will, it will seem obvious that an action is up to an agent only if she had the freedom to do otherwise. But what does this freedom come to? The freedom to do otherwise is clearly a modal property of agents, but it is controversial just what species of modality is at stake. It must be more than mere possibility : to have the freedom to do otherwise consists in more than the mere possibility of something else’s happening. A more plausible and widely endorsed understanding claims the relevant modality is ability or power (Locke 1690 [1975], II.xx; Reid 1788 [1969], II.i–ii; D. Locke 1973; Clarke 2009; Vihvelin 2013). But abilities themselves seem to come in different varieties (Lewis 1976; Horgan 1979; van Inwagen 1983, ch. 1; Mele 2003; Clarke 2009; Vihvelin 2013, ch. 1; Franklin 2015; Cyr and Swenson 2019; Hofmann 2022; Whittle 2022), so a claim that an agent has ‘the ability to do otherwise’ is potentially ambiguous or indeterminate; in philosophical discussion, the sense of ability appealed to needs to be spelled out. A satisfactory account of the freedom to do otherwise owes us both an account of the kind of ability in terms of which the freedom to do otherwise is analyzed, and an argument for why this kind of ability (as opposed to some other species) is the one constitutive of the freedom to do otherwise. As we will see, philosophers sometimes leave this second debt unpaid.

The contemporary literature takes its cue from classical compatibilism’s recognized failure to deliver a satisfactory analysis of the freedom to do otherwise. As we saw above, classical compatibilists (Hobbes 1654 [1999], 1656 [1999]; Locke 1690 [1975]; Hume 1740 [1978], 1748 [1975]; Edwards 1754 [1957]; Moore 1912; Schlick 1939; Ayer 1954) sought to analyze the freedom to do otherwise in terms of a simple conditional analysis of ability:

Simple Conditional Analysis: An agent \(S\) has the ability to do otherwise if and only if, were \(S\) to choose to do otherwise, then \(S\) would do otherwise.

Part of the attraction of this analysis is that it obviously reconciles the freedom to do otherwise with determinism. While the truth of determinism entails that one’s action is inevitable given the past and laws of nature, there is nothing about determinism that implies that if one had chosen otherwise, then one would not do otherwise.

There are two problems with the Simple Conditional Analysis . The first is that it is, at best, an analysis of free action, not free will (cf. Reid 1788 [1969]; Chisholm 1966; 1976, ch. 2; Lehrer 1968, 1976). It only tells us when an agent has the ability to do otherwise, not when an agent has the ability to choose to do otherwise. One might be tempted to think that there is an easy fix along the following lines:

Simple Conditional Analysis*: An agent \(S\) has the ability to choose otherwise if and only if, were \(S\) to desire or prefer to choose otherwise, then \(S\) would choose otherwise.

The problem is that we often fail to choose to do things we want to choose, even when it appears that we had the ability to choose otherwise (one might think the same problem attends the original analysis). Suppose that, in deciding how to spend my evening, I have a desire to choose to read and a desire to choose to watch a movie. Suppose that I choose to read. By all appearances, I had the ability to choose to watch a movie. And yet, according to the Simple Conditional Analysis* , I lack this freedom, since the conditional ‘if I were to desire to choose to watch a movie, then I would choose to watch a movie’ is false. I do desire to choose to watch a movie and yet I do not choose to watch a movie. It is unclear how to remedy this problem. On the one hand, we might refine the antecedent by replacing ‘desire’ with ‘strongest desire’ (cf. Hobbes 1654 [1999], 1656 [1999]; Edwards 1754 [1957]). The problem is that this assumes, implausibly, that we always choose what we most strongly desire (for criticisms of this view see Reid 1788 [1969]; Campbell 1951; Wallace 1999; Holton 2009). On the other hand, we might refine the consequent by replacing ‘would choose to do otherwise’ with either ‘would probably choose to do otherwise’ or ‘might choose to do otherwise’. But each of these proposals is also problematic. If ‘probably’ means ‘more likely than not’, then this revised conditional still seems too strong: it seems possible to have the ability to choose otherwise even when one’s so choosing is unlikely. If we opt for ‘might’, then the relevant sense of modality needs to be spelled out.

Even if there are fixes to these problems, there is a yet deeper problem with these analyses. There are some agents who clearly lack the freedom to do otherwise and yet satisfy the conditional at the heart of these analyses. That is, although these agents lack the freedom to do otherwise, it is, for example, true of them that if they chose otherwise, they would do otherwise. Picking up on an argument developed by Keith Lehrer (1968; cf. Campbell 1951; Broad 1952; Chisholm 1966), consider an agoraphobic, Luke, who, when faced with the prospect of entering an open space, is subject not merely to an irresistible desire to refrain from intentionally going outside, but an irresistible desire to refrain from even choosing to go outside. Given Luke’s psychology, there is no possible world in which he suffers from his agoraphobia and chooses to go outside. It may well nevertheless be true that if Luke chose to go outside, then he would have gone outside. After all, any possible world in which he chooses to go outside will be a world in which he no longer suffers (to the same degree) from his agoraphobia, and thus we have no reason to doubt that in those worlds he would go outside as a result of his choosing to go outside. The same kind of counterexample applies with equal force to the conditional ‘if \(S\) desired to choose otherwise, then \(S\) would choose otherwise’.

While simple conditional analyses admirably make clear the species of ability to which they appeal, they fail to show that this species of ability is constitutive of the freedom to do otherwise. Agents need a stronger ability to do otherwise than characterized by such simple conditionals. Some argue that the fundamental source of the above problems is the conditional nature of these analyses (Campbell 1951; Austin 1961; Chisholm 1966; Lehrer 1976; van Inwagen 1983, ch. 4). The sense of ability relevant to the freedom to do otherwise is the ‘all-in sense’—that is, holding everything fixed up to the time of the decision or action—and this sense, so it is argued, can only be captured by a categorical analysis of the ability to do otherwise:

Categorical Analysis: An agent \(S\) has the ability to choose or do otherwise than \(\phi\) at time \(t\) if and only if it was possible, holding fixed everything up to \(t\), that \(S\) choose or do otherwise than \(\phi\) at \(t\).

This analysis gets the right verdict in Luke’s case. He lacks the ability to do otherwise than refrain from choosing to go outside, according to this analysis, because there is no possible world in which he suffers from his agoraphobia and yet chooses to go outside. Unlike the above conditional analyses, the Categorical Analysis requires that we hold fixed Luke’s agoraphobia when considering alternative possibilities.

If the Categorical Analysis is correct, then free will is incompatible with determinism. According to the thesis of determinism, all deterministic possible worlds with the same pasts and laws of nature have the same futures (Lewis 1979; van Inwagen 1983, 3). Suppose John is in deterministic world \(W\) and refrains from raising his hand at time \(t\). Since \(W\) is deterministic, it follows that any possible world \(W^*\) that has the same past and laws up to \(t\) must have the same future, including John’s refraining from raising his hand at \(t\). Therefore, John lacked the ability, and thus freedom, to raise his hand.

This argument, carefully articulated in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Carl Ginet (1966, 1990) and Peter van Inwagen (1975, 1983) and refined in important ways by John Martin Fischer (1994), has come to be known as the Consequence Argument. van Inwagen offers the following informal statement of the argument:

If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequences of the laws of nature and events in the remote past. But it is not up to us what went on before we were born [i.e., we do not have the ability to change the past], and neither is it up to us what the laws of nature are [i.e., we do not have the ability to break the laws of nature]. Therefore, the consequences of these things (including our present acts) are not up to us. (van Inwagen 1983, 16; cf. Fischer 1994, ch. 1)

Like the Simple Conditional Analysis , a virtue of the Categorical Analysis is that it spells out clearly the kind of ability appealed to in its analysis of the freedom to do otherwise, but like the Simple Conditional Analysis , critics have argued that the sense of ability it captures is not the sense at the heart of free will. The objection here, though, is not that the analysis is too permissive or weak, but rather that it is too restrictive or strong.

While there have been numerous different replies along these lines (e.g., Lehrer 1980; Slote 1982; Watson 1986. See the entry on arguments for incompatibilism for a more extensive discussion of and bibliography for the Consequence Argument), the most influential of these objections is due to David Lewis (1981). Lewis contended that van Inwagen’s argument equivocated on ‘is able to break a law of nature’. We can distinguish two senses of ‘is able to break a law of nature’:

(Weak Thesis) I am able to do something such that, if I did it, a law of nature would be broken.

(Strong Thesis) I am able to do something such that, if I did it, it would constitute a law of nature’s being broken or would cause a law of nature to be broken.

If we are committed to the Categorical Analysis , then those desiring to defend compatibilism seem to be committed to the sense of ability in ‘is able to break a law of nature’ along the lines of the strong thesis. Lewis agrees with van Inwagen that it is “incredible” to think humans have such an ability (Lewis 1981, 113), but maintains that compatibilists need only appeal to the ability to break a law of nature in the weak sense. While it is absurd to think that humans are able to do something that is a violation of a law of nature or causes a law of nature to be broken, there is nothing incredible, so Lewis claimed, in thinking that humans are able to do something such that if they did it, a law of nature would be broken. In essence, Lewis is arguing that incompatibilists like van Inwagen have failed to adequately motivate the restrictiveness of the Categorical Analysis .

Some incompatibilists have responded to Lewis by contending that even the weak ability is incredible (van Inwagen 2004). But there is a different and often overlooked problem for Lewis: the weak ability seems to be too weak. Returning to the case of John’s refraining from raising his hand, Lewis maintains that the following three propositions are consistent:

One might think that (ii) and (iii) are incompatible with (i). Consider again Luke, our agoraphobic. Suppose that his agoraphobia affects him in such a way that he will only intentionally go outside if he chooses to go outside, and yet his agoraphobia makes it impossible for him to make this choice. In this case, a necessary condition for Luke’s intentionally going outside is his choosing to go outside. Moreover, Luke is not able to choose or cause himself to choose to go outside. Intuitively, this would seem to imply that Luke lacks the freedom to go outside. But this implication does not follow for Lewis. From the fact that Luke is able to go outside only if he chooses to go outside and the fact that Luke is not able to choose to go outside, it does not follow , on Lewis’s account, that Luke lacks the ability to go outside. Consequently, Lewis’s account fails to explain why Luke lacks the ability to go outside (cf. Speak 2011). (For other important criticisms of Lewis, see Ginet [1990, ch. 5] and Fischer [1994, ch. 4].)

While Lewis may be right that the Categorical Analysis is too restrictive, his argument, all by itself, doesn’t seem to establish this. His argument is successful only if (a) he can provide an alternative analysis of ability that entails that Luke’s agoraphobia robs him of the ability to go outside and (b) does not entail that determinism robs John of the ability to raise his hand (cf. Pendergraft 2010). Lewis must point out a principled difference between these two cases. As should be clear from the above, the Simple Conditional Analysis is of no help. However, some recent work by Michael Smith (2003), Kadri Vihvelin (2004; 2013), and Michael Fara (2008) have attempted to fill this gap. What unites these theorists—whom Clarke (2009) has called the ‘new dispositionalists’—is their attempt to appeal to recent advances in the metaphysics of dispositions to arrive at a revised conditional analysis of the freedom to do otherwise. The most perspicuous of these accounts is offered by Vihvelin (2004), who argues that an agent’s having the ability to do otherwise is solely a function of the agent’s intrinsic properties. (It is important to note that Vihvelin [2013] has come to reject the view that free will consists exclusively in the kind of ability analyzed below.) Building on Lewis’s work on the metaphysics of dispositions, she arrives at the following analysis of ability:

Revised Conditional Analysis of Ability : \(S\) has the ability at time \(t\) to do \(X\) iff, for some intrinsic property or set of properties \(B\) that \(S\) has at \(t\), for some time \(t'\) after \(t\), if \(S\) chose (decided, intended, or tried) at \(t\) to do \(X\), and \(S\) were to retain \(B\) until \(t'\), \(S\)’s choosing (deciding, intending, or trying) to do \(X\) and \(S\)’s having \(B\) would jointly be an \(S\)-complete cause of \(S\)’s doing \(X\). (Vihvelin 2004, 438)

Lewis defines an ‘\(S\)-complete cause’ as “a cause complete insofar as havings of properties intrinsic to [\(S\)] are concerned, though perhaps omitting some events extrinsic to [\(S\)]” (cf. Lewis 1997, 156). In other words, an \(S\)-complete cause of \(S\)’s doing \(\phi\) requires that \(S\) possess all the intrinsic properties relevant to \(S\)’s causing \(S\)’s doing \(\phi\). This analysis appears to afford Vihvelin the basis for a principled difference between agoraphobics and merely determined agents. We must hold fixed an agent’s phobias since they are intrinsic properties of agents, but we need not hold fixed the laws of nature because these are not intrinsic properties of agents. (It should be noted that the assumption that intrinsic properties are wholly separable from the laws of nature is disputed by ‘dispositional essentialists.’ See the entry on metaphysics of causation .) Vihvelin’s analysis appears to be restrictive enough to exclude phobics from having the freedom to do otherwise, but permissive enough to allow that some agents in deterministic worlds have the freedom to do otherwise.

But appearances can be deceiving. The new dispositionalist claims have received some serious criticism, with the majority of the criticisms maintaining that these analyses are still too permissive (Clarke 2009; Whittle 2010; Franklin 2011b). For example, Randolph Clarke argues that Vihvelin’s analysis fails to overcome the original problem with the Simple Conditional Analysis . He writes, “A phobic agent might, on some occasion, be unable to choose to A and unable to A without so choosing, while retaining all that she would need to implement such a choice, should she make it. Despite lacking the ability to choose to A , the agent might have some set of intrinsic properties B such that, if she chose to A and retained B , then her choosing to A and her having B would jointly be an agent-complete cause of her A -ing” (Clarke 2009, p. 329).

The Categorical Analysis , and thus incompatibilism about free will and determinism, remains an attractive option for many philosophers precisely because it seems that compatibilists have yet to furnish an analysis of the freedom to do otherwise that implies that phobics clearly lack the ability to choose or do otherwise that is relevant to moral responsibility and yet some merely determined agents have this ability.

Some have tried to avoid these lingering problems for compatibilists by arguing that the freedom to do otherwise is not required for free will or moral responsibility. What matters for an agent’s freedom and responsibility, so it is argued, is the source of her action—how her action was brought about. The most prominent strategy for defending this move appeals to ‘Frankfurt-style cases’. In a ground-breaking article, Harry Frankfurt (1969) presented a series of thought experiments intended to show that it is possible that agents are morally responsible for their actions and yet they lack the ability to do otherwise. While Frankfurt (1971) took this to show that moral responsibility and free will come apart—free will requires the ability to do otherwise but moral responsibility does not—if we define ‘free will’ as ‘the strongest control condition required for moral responsibility’ (cf. Wolf 1990, 3–4; Fischer 1994, 3; Mele 2006, 17), then if Frankfurt-style cases show that moral responsibility does not require the ability to do otherwise, then they also show that free will does not require the ability to do otherwise. Let us consider this challenge in more detail.

Here is a representative Frankfurt-style case:

Imagine, if you will, that Black is a quite nifty (and even generally nice) neurosurgeon. But in performing an operation on Jones to remove a brain tumor, Black inserts a mechanism into Jones’s brain which enables Black to monitor and control Jones’s activities. Jones, meanwhile, knows nothing of this. Black exercises this control through a sophisticated computer which he has programmed so that, among other things, it monitors Jones’s voting behavior. If Jones were to show any inclination to vote for Bush, then the computer, through the mechanism in Jones’s brain, intervenes to ensure that he actually decides to vote for Clinton and does so vote. But if Jones decides on his own to vote for Clinton, the computer does nothing but continue to monitor—without affecting—the goings-on in Jones’s head. (Fischer 2006, 38)

Fischer goes on to suppose that Jones “decides to vote for Clinton on his own”, without any interference from Black, and maintains that in such a case Jones is morally responsible for his decision. Fischer draws two interrelated conclusions from this case. The first, negative conclusion, is that the ability to do otherwise is not necessary for moral responsibility. Jones is unable to refrain from deciding to vote for Clinton, and yet, so long as Jones decides to vote for Clinton on his own, his decision is free and one for which he is morally responsible. The second, positive conclusion, is that freedom and responsibility are functions of the actual sequence . What matters for an agent’s freedom and moral responsibility is not what might have happened, but how his action was actually brought about. What matters is not whether the agent had the ability to do otherwise, but whether he was the source of his actions.

The success of Frankfurt-style cases is hotly contested. An early and far-reaching criticism is due to David Widerker (1995), Carl Ginet (1996), and Robert Kane (1996, 142–43). According to this criticism, proponents of Frankfurt-style cases face a dilemma: either these cases assume that the connection between the indicator (in our case, the absence of Jones’s showing any inclination to decide to vote for Bush) and the agent’s decision (here, Jones’s deciding to vote for Clinton) is deterministic or not. If the connection is deterministic, then Frankfurt-style cases cannot be expected to convince incompatibilists that the ability to do otherwise is not necessary for moral responsibility and/or free will, since Jones’s action will be deterministically brought about by factors beyond his control, leading incompatibilists to conclude that Jones is not morally responsible for his decision. But if the connection is nondeterministic, then it is possible even in the absence of showing any inclination to decide to vote for Bush, that Jones decides to vote for Bush, and so he retains the ability to do otherwise. Either way Frankfurt-style cases fail to show that Jones is both morally responsible for his decision and yet is unable to do otherwise.

While some have argued that even Frankfurt-style cases that assume determinism are effective (see, e.g., Fischer 1999, 2010, 2013 and Haji and McKenna 2004 and for criticisms of this approach, see Goetz 2005, Palmer 2005, 2014, Widerker and Goetz 2013, and Cohen 2017), the majority of proponents of Frankfurt-style cases have attempted to revise these cases so that they are explicitly nondeterministic and yet still show that the agent was morally responsible even though he lacked the ability to do otherwise—or, at least that he lacked any ability to do otherwise that could be relevant to grounding the agent’s moral responsibility (see, e.g., Mele and Robb 1998, 2003, Pereboom 2001, 2014, McKenna 2003, Hunt 2005, and for criticisms of these cases see Ginet 2002, Timpe 2006, Widerker 2006, Franklin 2011c, Moya 2011, Palmer 2011, 2013, Robinson 2014, Capes 2016, Capes and Swenson 2017, and Elzein 2017).

Supposing that Frankfurt-style cases are successful, what exactly do they show? In our view, they show neither that free will and moral responsibility do not require an ability to do otherwise in any sense nor that compatibilism is true. Frankfurt-style cases are of clear help to the compatibilists’ position (though see Speak 2007 for a dissenting opinion). The Consequence Argument raises a powerful challenge to the cogency of compatibilism. But if Frankfurt-style cases are successful, agents can act freely in the sense relevant to moral responsibility while lacking the ability to do otherwise in the all-in sense. This allows compatibilists to concede that the all-in ability to do otherwise is incompatible with determinism, and yet insist that it is irrelevant to the question of the compatibility of determinism with moral responsibility (and perhaps even free will, depending on how we define this) (cf. Fischer 1987, 1994. For a challenge to the move from not strictly necessary to irrelevant, see O’Connor [2000, 20–22] and in reply, Fischer [2006, 152–56].). But, of course, showing that an argument for the falsity of compatibilism is irrelevant does not show that compatibilism is true. Indeed, many incompatibilists maintain that Frankfurt-style cases are successful and defend incompatibilism not via the Consequence Argument, but by way of arguments that attempt to show that agents in deterministic worlds cannot be the ‘source’ of their actions in the way that moral responsibility requires (Stump 1999; Zagzebski 2000; Pereboom 2001, 2014). Thus, if successful, Frankfurt-style cases would be at best the first step in defending compatibilism. The second step must offer an analysis of the kind of sourcehood constitutive of free will that entails that free will is compatible with determinism (cf. Fischer 1982).

Furthermore, while proponents of Frankfurt-style cases often maintain that these cases show that no ability to do otherwise is necessary for moral responsibility (“I have employed the Frankfurt-type example to argue that this sense of control [i.e. the one required for moral responsibility] need not involve any alternative possibilities” [Fischer 2006, p. 40; emphasis ours]), we believe that this conclusion overreaches. At best, Frankfurt-style cases show that the ability to do otherwise in the all-in sense —in the sense defined by the Categorical Analysis —is not necessary for free will or moral responsibility (cf. Franklin 2015). To appreciate this, let us assume that in the above Frankfurt-style case Jones lacks the ability to do otherwise in the all-in sense: there is no possible world in which we hold fixed the past and laws and yet Jones does otherwise, since all such worlds include Black and his preparations for preventing Jones from doing otherwise should Jones show any inclination. Even if this is all true, it should take only a little reflection to recognize that in this case Jones is able to do otherwise in certain weaker senses we might attach to that phrase, and compatibilists in fact still think that the ability to do otherwise in some such senses is necessary for free will and moral responsibility. Consequently, even though Frankfurt-style cases have, as a matter of fact, moved many compatibilists away from emphasizing ability to do otherwise to emphasizing sourcehood, we suggest that this move is best seen as a weakening of the ability-to-do-otherwise condition on moral responsibility (but see Cyr 2017 and Kittle 2019 for criticisms of this claim). (A potentially important exception to this claim is Sartorio [2016], who appealing to some controversial ideas in the metaphysics of causation appears to argue that no sense of the ability to do otherwise is necessary for control in the sense at stake for moral responsibility, but instead what matters is whether the agent is the cause of the action. We simply note that Sartorio’s account of causation is a modal one [see especially Sartorio (2016, 94–95, 132–37)] and thus it is far from clear that her account of freedom and responsibility is really an exception.)

In this section, we will assume that Frankfurt-style cases are successful in order to consider two prominent compatibilist attempts to construct analyses of the sourcehood condition (though see the entry on compatibilism for a more systematic survey of compatibilist theories of free will). The first, and perhaps most popular, compatibilist model is a reasons-responsiveness model. According to this model, an agent’s action \(\phi\) is free just in case the agent or manner in which the action is brought about is responsive to the reasons available to the agent at the time of action. While compatibilists develop this kind of account in different ways, the most detailed proposal is due to John Martin Fischer (1994, 2006, 2010, 2012; Fischer and Ravizza 1998. For similar compatibilist treatments of reasons-responsiveness, see Wolf 1990, Wallace 1994, Haji 1998, Nelkin 2011, McKenna 2013, Vargas 2013, Sartorio 2016). Fischer and Ravizza argue that an agent’s action is free and one for which he is morally responsible only if the mechanism that issued in the action is moderately reasons-responsive (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, ch. 3). By ‘mechanism’, Fischer and Ravizza simply mean “the way the action was brought about” (38). One mechanism they often discuss is practical deliberation. For example, in the case of Jones discussed above, his decision to vote for Clinton on his own was brought about by the process of practical deliberation. What must be true of this process, this mechanism, for it to be moderately reasons-responsive? Fischer and Ravizza maintain that moderate reasons-responsiveness consists in two conditions: reasons-receptivity and reasons-reactivity. A mechanism’s reasons-receptivity depends on the agent’s cognitive capacities, such as being capable of understanding moral reasons and the implications of their actions (69–73). The second condition is more important for us in the present context. A mechanism’s reasons-reactivity depends on how the mechanism would react given different reasons for action. Fischer and Ravizza argue that the kind of reasons-reactivity at stake is weak reasons-reactivity, where this merely requires that there is some possible world in which the laws of nature remain the same, the same mechanism operates, there is a sufficient reason to do otherwise, and the mechanism brings about the alternative action in response to this sufficient reason (73–76). On this analysis, while Jones, due to the activity of Black, lacks the ‘all-in’ sense of the ability to do otherwise, he is nevertheless morally responsible for deciding to vote for Clinton because his action finds its source in Jones’s practical deliberation that is moderately reasons-responsive.

Fischer and Ravizza’s theory of freedom and responsibility has shifted the focus of much recent debate to questions of sourcehood. Moreover, one might argue that this theory is a clear improvement over classical compatibilism with respect to handling cases of phobia. By focusing on mechanisms, Fischer and Ravizza can argue that our agoraphobic Luke is not morally responsible for deciding to refrain from going outside because the mechanism that issues in this action—namely his agoraphobia—is not moderately reasons-responsive. There is no world with the same laws of nature as our own, this mechanism operates, and yet it reacts to a sufficient reason to go outside. No matter what reasons there are for Luke to go outside, when acting on this mechanism, he will always refrain from going outside (cf. Fischer 1987, 74).

Before turning to our second compatibilist model, it is worth noting that it would be a mistake to think that Fischer and Ravizza’s account is a sourcehood account to the exclusion of the ability to do otherwise in any sense. As we have just seen, Fischer and Ravizza place clear modal requirements on mechanisms that issue in actions with respect to which agents are free and morally responsible. Indeed, this should be clear from the very idea of reasons-responsiveness. Whether one is responsive depends not merely on how one does respond, but also on how one would respond. Thus, any account that makes reasons-responsiveness an essential condition of free will is an account that makes the ability to do otherwise, in some sense, necessary for free will (Fischer [2018] concedes this point, though, as noted above, the reader should consider Sartorio [2016] as a potential counterexample to this claim).

The second main compatibilist model of sourcehood is an identification model. Accounts of sourcehood of this kind lay stress on self-determination or autonomy: to be the source of her action the agent must self-determine her action. Like the contemporary discussion of the ability to do otherwise, the contemporary discussion of the power of self-determination begins with the failure of classical compatibilism to produce an acceptable definition. According to classical compatibilists, self-determination simply consists in the agent’s action being determined by her strongest motive. On the assumption that some compulsive agents’ compulsions operate by generating irresistible desires to act in certain ways, the classical compatibilist analysis of self-determination implies that these compulsive actions are self-determined. While Hobbes seems willing to accept this implication (1656 [1999], 78), most contemporary compatibilists concede that this result is unacceptable.

Beginning with the work of Harry Frankfurt (1971) and Gary Watson (1975), many compatibilists have developed identification accounts of self-determination that attempt to draw a distinction between an agent’s desires or motives that are internal to the agent and those that are external. The idea is that while agents are not (or at least may not be) identical to any motivations (or bundle of motivations), they are identified with a subset of their motivations, rendering these motivations internal to the agent in such a way that any actions brought about by these motivations are self -determined. The identification relation is not an identity relation, but something weaker (cf. Bratman 2000, 39n12). What the precise nature of the identification relation is and to which attitudes an agent stands in this relation is hotly disputed. Lippert-Rasmussen (2003) helpfully divides identification accounts into two main types. The first are “authority” accounts, according to which agents are identified with attitudes that are authorized to speak for them (368). The second are authenticity accounts, according to which agents are identified with attitudes that reveal who they truly are (368). (But see Shoemaker 2015 for an ecumenical account of identification that blends these two accounts.) Proposed attitudes to which agents are said to stand in the identification relation include higher-order desires (Frankfurt 1971), cares or loves (Frankfurt 1993, 1994; Shoemaker 2003; Jaworska 2007; Sripada 2016), self-governing policies (Bratman 2000), the desire to make sense of oneself (Velleman 1992, 2009), and perceptions (or judgments) of the good (or best) (Watson 1975; Stump 1988; Ekstrom 1993; Mitchell-Yellin 2015).

The distinction between internal and external motivations allows identification theorists to enrich classical compatibilists’ understanding of constraint, while remaining compatibilists about free will and determinism. According to classical compatibilists, the only kind of constraint is external (e.g., broken cars and broken legs), but addictions and phobias seem just as threatening to free will. Identification theorists have the resources to concede that some constraints are internal. For example, they can argue that our agoraphobic Luke is not free in refraining from going outside even though this decision was caused by his strongest desires because he is not identified with his strongest desires. On compatibilist identification accounts, what matters for self-determination is not whether our actions are determined or undetermined, but whether they are brought about by motives with which the agent is identified: exercises of the power of self-determination consists in an agent’s actions being brought about, in part, by an agent’s motives with which she is identified. (It is important to note that while we have distinguished reasons-responsive accounts from identification accounts, there is nothing preventing one from combing both elements in a complete analysis of free will.)

Even if these reasons-responsive and identification compatibilist accounts of sourcehood might successfully side-step the Consequence Argument, they must come to grips with a second incompatibilist argument: the Manipulation Argument. The general problem raised by this line of argument is that whatever proposed compatibilist conditions for an agent \(S\)’s being free with respect to, and morally responsible for, some action \(\phi\), it will seem that agents can be manipulated into satisfying these conditions with respect to \(\phi\) and, yet, precisely because they are manipulated into satisfying these conditions, their freedom and responsibility seem undermined. The two most influential forms of the Manipulation Argument are Pereboom’s Four-case Argument (2001, ch. 4; 2014, ch. 4) and Mele’s Zygote Argument (2006, ch. 7. See Todd 2010, 2012 for developments of Mele’s argument). As the structure of Mele’s version is simpler, we will focus on it.

Imagine a goddess Diana who creates a zygote \(Z\) in Mary in some deterministic world. Suppose that Diana creates \(Z\) as she does because she wants Jones to be murdered thirty years later. From her knowledge of the laws of nature in her world and her knowledge of the state of the world just prior to her creating \(Z\), she knows that a zygote with precisely \(Z\)’s constitution located in Mary will develop into an agent Ernie who, thirty years later, will murder Jones as a result of his moderately reasons-responsive mechanism and on the basis of motivations with which he is identified (whatever those might be). Suppose Diana succeeds in her plan and Ernie murders Jones as a result of her manipulation.

Many judge that Ernie is not morally responsible for murdering Jones even though he satisfies both the reasons-responsive and identification criteria. There are two possible lines of reply open to compatibilists. On the soft-line reply, compatibilists attempt to show that there is a relevant difference between manipulated agents such as Ernie and agents who satisfy their account (McKenna 2008, 470). For example, Fischer and Ravizza propose a second condition on sourcehood: in addition to a mechanism’s being moderately reasons-responsive, an agent is morally responsible for the output of such a mechanism only if the agent has come to take responsibility for the mechanism, where an agent has taken responsibility for a mechanism \(M\) just in case (i) she believes that she is an agent when acting from \(M\), (ii) she believes that she is an apt target for blame and praise for acting from \(M\), and (iii) her beliefs specified in (i) and (ii) are “based, in an appropriate way, on [her] evidence” (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 238). The problem with this reply is that we can easily imagine Diana creating Ernie so that his murdering Jones is a result not only of a moderately reasons-responsive mechanism, but also a mechanism for which he has taken responsibility. On the hard-line reply, compatibilists concede that, despite initial appearances, the manipulated agent is free and morally responsible and attempt to ameliorate the seeming counterintuitiveness of this concession (McKenna 2008, 470–71). Here compatibilists might point out that the idea of being manipulated is worrisome only so long as the manipulators are interfering with an agent’s development. But if the manipulators simply create a person, and then allow that person’s life to unfold without any further inference, the manipulators’ activity is no threat to freedom (McKenna 2008; Fischer 2011; Sartorio 2016, ch. 5). (For other responses to the Manipulation Argument, see Kearns 2012; Sripada 2012; McKenna 2014.)

Despite these compatibilist replies, to some the idea that the entirety of a free agent’s life can be determined, and in this way controlled, by another agent will seem incredible. Some take the lesson of the Manipulation Argument to be that no compatibilist account of sourcehood or self-determination is satisfactory. True sourcehood—the kind of sourcehood that can actually ground an agent’s freedom and responsibility—requires, so it is argued, that one’s action not be causally determined by factors beyond one’s control.

Libertarians, while united in endorsing this negative condition on sourcehood, are deeply divided concerning which further positive conditions may be required. It is important to note that while libertarians are united in insisting that compatibilist accounts of sourcehood are insufficient, they are not committed to thinking that the conditions of freedom spelled out in terms either of reasons-responsiveness or of identification are not necessary. For example, Stump (1988, 1996, 2010) builds a sophisticated libertarian model of free will out of resources originally developed within Frankfurt’s identification model (see also Ekstrom 1993, 2000; Franklin 2014) and nearly all libertarians agree that exercises of free will require agents to be reasons-responsive (e.g., Kane 1996; Clarke 2003, chs. 8–9; Franklin 2018, ch. 2). Moreover, while this section focuses on libertarian accounts of sourcehood, we remind readers that most (if not all) libertarians think that the freedom to do otherwise is also necessary for free will and moral responsibility.

There are three main libertarian options for understanding sourcehood or self-determination: non-causal libertarianism (Ginet 1990, 2008; McCann 1998; Lowe 2008; Goetz 2009; Pink 2017; Palmer 2021), event-causal libertarianism (Wiggins 1973; Kane 1996, 1999, 2011, 2016; Mele 1995, chs. 11–12; 2006, chs. 4–5; 2017; Ekstrom 2000, 2019; Clarke 2003, chs. 2–6; Franklin 2018), and agent-causal libertarianism (Reid 1788 [1969]; Chisholm 1966, 1976; Taylor 1966; O’Connor 2000; Clarke 1993; 1996; 2003, chs. 8–10; Griffith 2010; Steward 2012). Non-causal libertarians contend that exercises of the power of self-determination need not (or perhaps even cannot) be caused or causally structured. According to this view, we control our volition or choice simply in virtue of its being ours—its occurring in us. We do not exert a special kind of causality in bringing it about; instead, it is an intrinsically active event, intrinsically something we do . While there may be causal influences upon our choice, there need not be, and any such causal influence is wholly irrelevant to understanding why it occurs. Reasons provide an autonomous, non-causal form of explanation. Provided our choice is not wholly determined by prior factors, it is free and under our control simply in virtue of being ours. Non-causal views have failed to garner wide support among libertarians since, for many, self- determination seems to be an essentially causal notion (cf. Mele 2000 and Clarke 2003, ch. 2). This dispute hinges on the necessary conditions on the concept of causal power, and relatedly on whether power simpliciter admits causal and non-causal variants. For discussion, see O’Connor (2021).

Most libertarians endorse an event-causal or agent-causal account of sourcehood. Both these accounts maintain that exercises of the power of self-determination consist partly in the agent’s bringing about her choice or action, but they disagree on how to analyze an agent’s bringing about her choice . While event-causal libertarianism admits of different species, at the heart of this view is the idea that self-determining an action requires, at minimum, that the agent cause the action and that an agent’s causing his action is wholly reducible to mental states and other events involving the agent nondeviantly causing his action. Consider an agent’s raising his hand. According to the event-causal model at its most basic level, an agent’s raising his hand consists in the agent’s causing his hand to rise and his causing his hand to rise consists in apt mental states and events involving the agent—such as the agent’s desire to ask a question and his belief that he can ask a question by raising his hand— nondeviantly causing his hand to rise. (The nondeviance clause is required since it seems possible that an event be brought about by one’s desires and beliefs and yet not be self-determined, or even an action for that matter, due to the unusual causal path leading from the desires and beliefs to action. Imagine a would-be accomplice of an assassin believes that his dropping his cigarette is the signal for the assassin to shoot his intended victim and he desires to drop his cigarette and yet this belief and desire so unnerve him that he accidentally drops his cigarette. While the event of dropping the cigarette is caused by a relevant desire and belief it does not seem to be self-determined and perhaps is not even an action [cf. Davidson 1973].) To fully spell out this account, event-causal libertarians must specify which mental states and events are apt (cf. Brand 1979)—which mental states and events are the springs of self-determined actions—and what nondeviance consists in (cf. Bishop 1989). (We note that this has proven very difficult, enough so that some take the problem to spell doom for event-causal theories of action. Such philosophers [e.g., Taylor 1966 and Sehon 2005] take agential power to be conceptually and/or ontologically primitive and understand reasons explanations of action in irreducibly teleological terms. See Stout 2010 for a brisk survey of discussions of this topic.) For ease, in what follows we will assume that apt mental states are an agent’s reasons that favor the action.

Event-causal libertarians, of course, contend that self-determination requires more than nondeviant causation by agents’ reasons: for it is possible that agents’ actions in deterministic worlds are nondeviantly caused by apt mental states and events. Self-determination requires nondeterministic causation, in a nondeviant way, by an agent’s reasons. While historically many have thought that nondeterministic causation is impossible (Hobbes 1654 [1999], 1656 [1999]; Hume 1740 [1978], 1748 [1975]), with the advent of quantum physics and, from a very different direction, an influential essay by G.E.M. Anscombe (1971), it is now widely assumed that nondeterministic (or probabilistic) causation is possible. There are two importantly different ways to understand nondeterministic causation: as the causation of probability or as the probability of causation. Under the causation of probability model, a nondeterministic cause \(C\) causes (or causally contributes to) the objective probability of the outcome’s occurring rather than the outcome itself. On this account, \(S\)’s reasons do not cause his decision but there being a certain antecedent objective probability of its occurring, and the decision itself is uncaused. On the competing probability of causation model, a nondeterministic cause \(C\) causes the outcome of a nondeterministic process. Given that \(C\) is a nondeterministic cause of the outcome, it was possible given the exact same past and laws of nature that \(C\) not cause the outcome (perhaps because it was possible that some other event cause some other outcome)—the probability of this causal transaction’s occurring was less than \(1\). Given that event-causal libertarians maintain that self-determined actions, and thus free actions, must be caused, they are committed to the probability of causation model of nondeterministic causation (cf. Franklin 2018, 25–26). (We note that Balaguer [2010] is skeptical of the above distinction, and it is thus unclear whether he should best be classified as a non-causal or event-causal libertarian, though see Balaguer [2014] for evidence that it is best to treat him as a non-causalist.) Consequently, according to event-causal libertarians, when an agent \(S\) self-determines his choice \(\phi\), then \(S\)’s reasons \(r_1\) nondeterministically cause (in a nondeviant way) \(\phi\), and it was possible, given the past and laws, that \(r_1\) not have caused \(\phi\), but rather some of \(S\)’s other reasons \(r_2\) nondeterministically caused (in a nondeviant way) a different action \(\psi\).

Agent-causal libertarians contend that the event-causal picture fails to capture self-determination, for it fails to accord the agent with a power to settle what she does. Pereboom offers a forceful statement of this worry:

On an event-causal libertarian picture, the relevant causal conditions antecedent to the decision, i.e., the occurrence of certain agent-involving events, do not settle whether the decision will occur, but only render the occurrence of the decision about \(50\%\) probable. In fact, because no occurrence of antecedent events settles whether the decision will occur, and only antecedent events are causally relevant, nothing settles whether the decision will occur. (Pereboom 2014, 32; cf. Watson 1987, 1996; Clarke 2003 [ch. 8], 2011; Griffith 2010; Shabo 2011, 2013; Steward 2012 [ch. 3]; and Schlosser 2014); and for critical assessment, see Clarke 2019.

On the event-causal picture, the agent’s causal contribution to her actions is exhausted by the causal contribution of her reasons, and yet her reasons leave open which decisions she will make, and this seems insufficient for self-determination.

But what more must be added? Agent-causal libertarians maintain that self-determination requires that the agent herself play a causal role over and above the causal role played by her reasons. Some agent-causal libertarians deny that an agent’s reasons play any direct causal role in bringing about an agent’s self-determined actions (Chisholm 1966; O’Connor 2000, ch. 5), whereas others allow or even require that self-determined actions be caused in part by the agent’s reasons (Clarke 2003, ch. 9; Steward 2012, ch. 3). But all agent-causal libertarians insist that exercises of the power of self-determination do not reduce to nondeterministic causation by apt mental states: agent-causation does not reduce to event-causation.

Agent-causal libertarianism seems to capture an aspect of self-determination that neither the above compatibilists accounts nor event-causal libertarian accounts capture. (Some compatibilists even accept this and try to incorporate agent-causation into a compatibilist understanding of free will. See Markosian 1999, 2012; Nelkin 2011.) These accounts reduce the causal role of the self to states and events to which the agent is not identical (even if he is identified with them). But how can self -determination of my actions wholly reduce to determination of my actions by things other than the self? Richard Taylor nicely expresses this intuition: “If I believe that something not identical to myself was the cause of my behavior—some event wholly external to myself, for instance, or even one internal to myself, such as a nerve impulse, volition, or whatnot—then I cannot regard the behavior as being an act of mine, unless I further believed that I was the cause of that external or internal event” (1974, 55; cf. Franklin 2016).

Despite its powerful intuitive pull for some, many have argued that agent-causal libertarianism is obscure or even incoherent. The stock objection used to be that the very idea of agent-causation—causation by agents that is not reducible to causation by mental states and events involving the agent—is incoherent, but this objection has become less common due to pioneering work by Chisholm (1966, 1976), Taylor (1974), O’Connor (2000, 2011), Clarke (2003), and Steward 2012, ch. 8). More common objections now concern, first, how to understand the relationship between agent-causation and an agent’s reasons (or motivations in general), and, second, the empirical adequacy of agent-causal libertarianism. With respect to the first worry, it is widely assumed that the only (or at least best) way to understand reasons-explanation and motivational influence is within a causal account of reasons, where reasons cause our actions (Davidson 1963; Mele 1992). If agent-causal libertarians accept that self-determined actions, in addition to being agent-caused, must also be caused by agents’ reasons that favored those actions, then agent-causal libertarians need to explain how to integrate these causes (for a detailed attempt to do just this, see Clarke 2003, ch. 8). Given that these two causes seem distinct, is it not possible that the agent cause his decision to \(\phi\) and yet the agent’s reasons simultaneously cause an incompatible decision to \(\psi\)? If agent-causal libertarians side-step this difficult question by denying that reasons cause action, then they must explain how reasons can explain and motivate action without causing it; and this has turned out to be no easy task. (For more general attempts to understand reasons-explanation and motivation within a non-causal framework see Schueler 1995, 2003; Sehon 2005). For further discussion see the entry on incompatibilist (nondeterministic) theories of free will .

Finally, we note that some recent philosophers have questioned the presumed difference between event- and agent-causation by arguing that all causation is object or substance causation. They argue that the dominant tendency to understand ‘garden variety’ causal transactions in the world as relations between events is an unfortunate legacy of David Hume’s rejection of substance and causation as basic metaphysical categories. On the competing metaphysical picture of the world, the event or state of an object’s having some property such as mass is its having a causal power, which in suitable circumstances it exercises to bring about a characteristic effect. Applied to human agents in an account of free will, the account suggests a picture on which an agent’s having desires, beliefs, and intentions are rational powers to will particular courses of action, and where the agent’s willing is not determined in any one direction, she wills freely. An advantage for the agent-causalist who embraces this broader metaphysics is ‘ideological’ parsimony. For different developments and defenses of this approach, see Lowe (2008), Swinburne (2013), and O’Connor (2021); and for reason to doubt that a substance-causal metaphysics helps to allay skepticism concerning free will, see Clarke and Reed (2015).

3. Do We Have Free Will?

Most philosophers theorizing about free will take themselves to be attempting to analyze a near-universal power of mature human beings. But as we’ve noted above, there have been free will skeptics in both ancient and (especially) modern times. (Israel 2001 highlights a number of such skeptics in the early modern period.) In this section, we summarize the main lines of argument both for and against the reality of human freedom of will.

There are both a priori and empirical arguments against free will (See the entry on skepticism about moral responsibility ). Several of these start with an argument that free will is incompatible with causal determinism, which we will not rehearse here. Instead, we focus on arguments that human beings lack free will, against the background assumption that freedom and causal determinism are incompatible.

The most radical a priori argument is that free will is not merely contingently absent but is impossible. Nietzsche 1886 [1966] argues to this effect, and more recently it has been argued by Galen Strawson (1986, ch. 2; 1994, 2002). Strawson associates free will with being ‘ultimately morally responsible’ for one’s actions. He argues that, because how one acts is a result of, or explained by, “how one is, mentally speaking” (\(M\)), for one to be responsible for that choice one must be responsible for \(M\). To be responsible for \(M\), one must have chosen to be \(M\) itself—and that not blindly, but deliberately, in accordance with some reasons \(r_1\). But for that choice to be a responsible one, one must have chosen to be such as to be moved by \(r_1\), requiring some further reasons \(r_2\) for such a choice. And so on, ad infinitum . Free choice requires an impossible infinite regress of choices to be the way one is in making choices.

There have been numerous replies to Strawson’s argument. Mele (1995, 221ff.) argues that Strawson misconstrues the locus of freedom and responsibility. Freedom is principally a feature of our actions, and only derivatively of our characters from which such actions spring. The task of the theorist is to show how one is in rational, reflective control of the choices one makes, consistent with there being no freedom-negating conditions. While this seems right, when considering those theories that make one’s free control to reside directly in the causal efficacy of one’s reasons (such as compatibilist reasons-responsive accounts or event-causal libertarianism), it is not beside the point to reflect on how one came to be that way in the first place and to worry that such reflection should lead one to conclude that true responsibility (and hence freedom) is undermined, since a complete distal source of any action may be found external to the agent. Clarke (2003, 170–76) argues that an effective reply may be made by indeterminists, and, in particular, by nondeterministic agent-causal theorists. Such theorists contend that (i) aspects of ‘how one is, mentally speaking’, fully explain an agent’s choice without causally determining it and (ii) the agent himself causes the choice that is made (so that the agent’s antecedent state, while grounding an explanation of the action, is not the complete causal source of it). Since the agent’s exercise of this power is causally undetermined, it is not true that there is a sufficient ‘ultimate’ source of it external to the agent. Finally, Mele (2006, 129–34, and 2017, 212–16) and O’Connor (2009b) suggest that freedom and moral responsibility come in degrees and grow over time, reflecting the fact that ‘how one is, mentally speaking’ is increasingly shaped by one’s own past choices. Furthermore, some choices for a given individual may reflect more freedom and responsibility than others, which may be the kernel of truth behind Strawson’s sweeping argument. (For discussion of the ways that nature, nurture, and contingent circumstances shape our behavior and raise deep issues concerning the extent of our freedom and responsibility, see Levy 2011 and Russell 2017, chs. 10–12.)

A second family of arguments against free will contend that, in one way or another, nondeterministic theories of freedom entail either that agents lack control over their choices or that the choices cannot be adequately explained. These arguments are variously called the ‘Mind’, ‘Rollback’, or ‘Luck’ argument, with the latter admitting of several versions. (For statements of such arguments, see van Inwagen 1983, ch. 4; 2000; Haji 2001; Mele 2006; Shabo 2011, 2013, 2020; Coffman 2015). We note that some philosophers advance such arguments not as parts of a general case against free will, but merely as showing the inadequacy of specific accounts of free will [see, e.g., Griffith 2010].) They each describe imagined cases—individual cases, or comparison of intra- or inter-world duplicate antecedent conditions followed by diverging outcomes—designed to elicit the judgment that the occurrence of a choice that had remained unsettled given all prior causal factors can only be a ‘matter of chance’, ‘random’, or ‘a matter of luck’. Such terms have been imported from other contexts and have come to function as quasi-technical, unanalyzed concepts in these debates, and it is perhaps more helpful to avoid such proxies and to conduct the debates directly in terms of the metaphysical notion of control and epistemic notion of explanation. Where the arguments question whether an undetermined agent can exercise appropriate control over the choice he makes, proponents of nondeterministic theories often reply that control is not exercised prior to, but at the time of the choice—in the very act of bringing it about (see, e.g., Clarke 2005 and O’Connor 2007). Where the arguments question whether undetermined choices can be adequately explained, the reply often consists in identifying a form of explanation other than the form demanded by the critic—a ‘noncontrastive’ explanation, perhaps, rather than a ‘contrastive’ explanation, or a species of contrastive explanation consistent with indeterminism (see, e.g., Kane 1999; Clarke, 2003, ch. 8; and Franklin 2011a; 2018, ch. 5).

We now consider empirical arguments against human freedom. Some of these stem from the physical sciences (while making assumptions concerning the way physical phenomena fix psychological phenomena) and others from neuroscience and psychology.

It used to be common for philosophers to argue that there is empirical reason to believe that the world in general is causally determined, and since human beings are parts of the world, they are too. Many took this to be strongly confirmed by the spectacular success of Isaac Newton’s framework for understanding the universe as governed everywhere by fairly simple, exceptionless laws of motion. But the quantum revolution of the early twentieth century has made that ‘clockwork universe’ image at least doubtful at the level of basic physics. While quantum mechanics has proven spectacularly successful as a framework for making precise and accurate predictions of certain observable phenomena, its implications for the causal structure of reality is still not well understood, and there are competing indeterministic and deterministic interpretations. See the entry on quantum mechanics for detailed discussion.) It is possible that indeterminacy on the small-scale, supposing it to be genuine, ‘cancels out’ at the macroscopic scale of birds and buildings and people, so that behavior at this scale is virtually deterministic. But this idea, once common, is now being challenged empirically, even at the level of basic biology. Furthermore, the social, biological, and medical sciences, too, are rife with merely statistical generalizations. Plainly, the jury is out on all these inter-theoretic questions. But that is just a way to say that current science does not decisively support the idea that everything we do is pre-determined by the past, and ultimately by the distant past, wholly out of our control. For discussion, see Balaguer (2009), Koch (2009), Roskies (2014), Ellis (2016).

Maybe, then, we are subject to myriad causal influences, but the sum total of these influences doesn’t determine what we do, they only make it more or less likely that we’ll do this or that. Now some of the a priori no-free-will arguments above center on nondeterministic theories according to which there are objective antecedent probabilities associated with each possible choice outcome. Why objective probabilities of this kind might present special problems beyond those posed by the absence of determinism has been insufficiently explored to date. (For brief discussion, see Vicens 2016 and O’Connor 2016.) But one philosopher who argues that there is reason to hold that our actions, if undetermined, are governed by objective probabilities and that this fact calls into question whether we act freely is Derk Pereboom (2001, ch. 3; 2014, ch. 3). Pereboom notes that our best physical theories indicate that statistical laws govern isolated, small-scale physical events, and he infers from the thesis that human beings are wholly physically composed that such statistical laws will also govern all the physical components of human actions. Finally, Pereboom maintains that agent-causal libertarianism offers the correct analysis of free will. He then invites us to imagine that the antecedent probability of some physical component of an action occurring is \(0.32\). If the action is free while not violating the statistical law, then, in a scenario with a large enough number of instances, this action would have to be freely chosen close to \(32\) percent of the time. This leads to the problem of “wild coincidences”:

if the occurrence of these physical components were settled by the choices of agent-causes, then their actually being chosen close to 32 percent of the time would amount to a coincidence no less wild than the coincidence of possible actions whose physical components have an antecedent probability of about 0.99 being chosen, over large enough number of instances, close to 99 percent of the time. The proposal that agent-caused free choices do not diverge from what the statistical laws predict for the physical components of our actions would run so sharply counter to what we would expect as to make it incredible. (2014, 67)

Clarke (2010) questions the implicit assumption that free agent-causal choices should be expected not to conform to physical statistical laws, while O’Connor (2009a) challenges the more general assumption that freedom requires that agent-causal choices not be governed by statistical laws of any kind, as they plausibly would be if the relevant psychological states/powers are strongly emergent from physical states of the human brain. Finally, Runyan 2018 argues that Pereboom’s case rests on an implausible empirical assumption concerning the evolution of objective probabilities concerning types of behavior over time.

Pereboom’s empirical basis for free will skepticism is very general. Others see support for free will skepticism from specific findings and theories in the human sciences. They point to evidence that we can be unconsciously influenced in the choices we make by a range of factors, including ones that are not motivationally relevant; that we can come to believe that we chose to initiate a behavior that in fact was artificially induced; that people subject to certain neurological disorders will sometimes engage in purposive behavior while sincerely believing that they are not directing them. Finally, a great deal of attention has been given to the work of neuroscientist Benjamin Libet (2002). Libet conducted some simple experiments that seemed to reveal the existence of ‘preparatory’ brain activity (the ‘readiness potential’) shortly before a subject engages in an ostensibly spontaneous action. (Libet interpreted this activity as the brain’s ‘deciding’ what to do before we are consciously settled on a course of action.) Wegner (2002) surveys all of these findings (some of which are due to his own work as a social psychologist) and argues on their basis that the experience of conscious willing is ‘an illusion’. For criticism of such arguments, see Mele (2009); Nahmias (2014); Mudrik et al. (2022); and several contributions to Maoz and Sinnott-Armstrong (2022). Libet’s interpretation of the readiness potential has come in for severe criticism. After extensive subsequent study, neuroscientists are uncertain what it signifies. For thorough review of the evidence, see Schurger et al. (2021).

While Pereboom and others point to these empirical considerations in defense of free will skepticism, other philosophers see them as reasons to favor a more modest free will agnosticism (Kearns 2015) or to promote revisionism about the ‘folk idea of free will’ (Vargas 2013; Nichols 2015).

If one is a compatibilist, then a case for the reality of free will requires evidence for our being effective agents who for the most part are aware of what we do and why we are doing it. If one is an incompatibilist, then the case requires in addition evidence for causal indeterminism, occurring in the right locations in the process leading from deliberation to action. Many think that we already have third-personal ‘neutral’ scientific evidence for much of human behavior’s satisfying modest compatibilist requirements, such as Fischer and Ravizza’s reasons-responsiveness account. However, given the immaturity of social science and the controversy over whether psychological states ‘reduce’ in some sense to underlying physical states (and what this might entail for the reality of mental causation), this claim is doubtful. A more promising case for our satisfying (at least) compatibilist requirements on freedom is that effective agency is presupposed by all scientific inquiry and so cannot rationally be doubted (which fact is overlooked by some of the more extreme ‘willusionists’ such as Wegner).

However, effective intervention in the world (in scientific practice and elsewhere) does not (obviously) require that our behavior be causally undetermined, so the ‘freedom is rationally presupposed’ argument cannot be launched for such an understanding of freedom. Instead, incompatibilists usually give one of the following two bases for rational belief in freedom (both of which can be given by compatibilists, too).

First, philosophers have long claimed that we have introspective evidence of freedom in our experience of action, or perhaps of consciously attended or deliberated action. Augustine and Scotus, discussed earlier, are two examples among many. In recent years, philosophers have been more carefully scrutinizing the experience of agency and a debate has emerged concerning its contents, and in particular whether it supports an indeterministic theory of human free action. For discussion, see Deery et al. (2013), Guillon (2014), Horgan (2015), and Bayne (2017).

Second, philosophers (e.g., Reid 1788 [1969], Swinburne 2013) sometimes claim that our belief in the reality of free will is epistemically basic, or reasonable without requiring independent evidential support. Most philosophers hold that some beliefs have that status, on pain of our having no justified beliefs whatever. It is controversial, however, just which beliefs do because it is controversial which criteria a belief must satisfy to qualify for that privileged status. It is perhaps necessary that a basic belief be ‘instinctive’ (unreflectively held) for all or most human beings; that it be embedded in regular experience; and that it be central to our understanding of an important aspect of the world. Our belief in free will seems to meet these criteria, but whether they are sufficient is debated. (O’Connor 2019 proposes that free will belief is epistemically basic but defeasible.) Other philosophers defend a variation on this stance, maintaining instead that belief in the reality of moral responsibility is epistemically basic, and that since moral responsibility entails free will, or so it is claimed, we may infer the reality of free will (see, e.g., van Inwagen 1983, 206–13).

4. Theological Wrinkles

A large portion of Western philosophical work on free will has been written within an overarching theological framework, according to which God is the ultimate source, sustainer, and end of all else. Some of these thinkers draw the conclusion that God must be a sufficient, wholly determining cause for everything that happens; all of them suppose that every creaturely act necessarily depends on the explanatorily prior, cooperative activity of God. It is also commonly presumed by philosophical theists that human beings are free and responsible (on pain of attributing evil in the world to God alone, and so impugning His perfect goodness). Hence, those who believe that God is omni-determining typically are compatibilists with respect to freedom and (in this case) theological determinism. Edwards (1754 [1957]) is a good example. But those who suppose that God’s sustaining activity (and special activity of conferring grace) is only a necessary condition on the outcome of human free choices need to tell a more subtle story, on which omnipotent God’s cooperative activity can be (explanatorily) prior to a human choice and yet the outcome of that choice be settled only by the choice itself. For important medieval discussions—the apex of philosophical reflection on theological concerns—see the relevant portions of Al-Ghazali IP , Aquinas BW and Scotus QAM . Three positions (given in order of logical strength) on God’s activity vis-à-vis creaturely activity were variously defended by thinkers of this area: mere conservationism, concurrentism, and occasionalism. These positions turn on subtle distinctions, which have recently been explored by Freddoso (1988), Kvanvig and McCann (1991), Koons (2002), Grant (2016 and 2019), and Judisch (2016).

Many suppose that there is a challenge to human freedom stemming not only from God’s perfect power but also from his perfect knowledge. A standard argument for the incompatibility of free will and causal determinism has a close theological analogue. Recall van Inwagen’s influential formulation of the ‘Consequence Argument’:

If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequences of the laws of nature and events in the remote past. But it is not up to us what went on before we were born, and neither is it up to us what the laws of nature are. Therefore, the consequences of these things (including our present acts) are not up to us. (van Inwagen 1983, 16)

And now consider an argument that turns on God’s comprehensive and infallible knowledge of the future:

If infallible divine foreknowledge is true, then our acts are the (logical) consequences of God’s beliefs in the remote past. (Since God cannot get things wrong, his believing that something will be so entails that it will be so.) But it is not up to us what beliefs God had before we were born, and neither is it up to us that God’s beliefs are necessarily true. Therefore, the consequences of these things (including our present acts) are not up to us.

An excellent discussion of these arguments in tandem and attempts to point to relevant disanalogies between causal determinism and infallible foreknowledge may be found in the introduction to Fischer (1989). See also the entry on foreknowledge and free will.

Another issue concerns how knowledge of God, the ultimate Good, would impact human freedom. Many philosophical theologians, especially the medieval Aristotelians, were drawn to the idea that human beings cannot but will that which they take to be an unqualified good. (As noted above, Duns Scotus is an exception to this consensus, as were Ockham and Suarez subsequently, but their dissent is limited.) Hence, if there is an afterlife, in which humans ‘see God face to face,’ they will inevitably be drawn to Him. Following Pascal, Murray (1993, 2002) argues that a good God would choose to make His existence and character less than certain for human beings, for the sake of preserving their freedom. (He will do so, the argument goes, at least for a period of time in which human beings participate in their own character formation.) If it is a good for human beings that they freely choose to respond in love to God and to act in obedience to His will, then God must maintain an ‘epistemic distance’ from them lest they be overwhelmed by His goodness or power and respond out of necessity, rather than freedom. (See also the other essays in Howard-Snyder and Moser 2002.)

If it is true that God withholds our ability to be certain of his existence for the sake of our freedom, then it is natural to conclude that humans will lack freedom in heaven. And it is anyways common to traditional Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologies to maintain that humans cannot sin in heaven. Even so, traditional Christian theology at least maintains that human persons in heaven are free. What sort of freedom is in view here, and how does it relate to mundane freedom? Two good recent discussions of these questions are Pawl and Timpe (2009) and Tamburro (2017).

Finally, there is the question of the freedom of God himself. Perfect goodness is an essential, not acquired, attribute of God. God cannot lie or be in any way immoral in His dealings with His creatures (appearances notwithstanding). Unless we take the minority position on which this is a trivial claim, since whatever God does definitionally counts as good, this appears to be a significant, inner constraint on God’s freedom. Did we not contemplate immediately above that human freedom would be curtailed by our having an unmistakable awareness of what is in fact the Good? And yet is it not passing strange to suppose that God should be less than perfectly free?

One suggested solution to this puzzle takes as its point of departure the distinction noted in section 2.3 between the ability to do otherwise and sourcehood, proposing that the core metaphysical feature of freedom is being the ultimate source, or originator, of one’s choices. For human beings or any created persons who owe their existence to factors outside themselves, the only way their acts of will could find their ultimate origin in themselves is for such acts not to be determined by their character and circumstances. For if all my willings were wholly determined, then if we were to trace my causal history back far enough, we would ultimately arrive at external factors that gave rise to me, with my particular genetic dispositions. My motives at the time would not be the ultimate source of my willings, only the most proximate ones. Only by there being less than deterministic connections between external influences and choices, then, is it be possible for me to be an ultimate source of my activity, concerning which I may truly say, “the buck stops here.”

As is generally the case, things are different on this point in the case of God. As Anselm observed, even if God’s character absolutely precludes His performing certain actions in certain contexts, this will not imply that some external factor is in any way a partial origin of His willings and refrainings from willing. Indeed, this would not be so even if he were determined by character to will everything which He wills. God’s nature owes its existence to nothing. Thus, God would be the sole and ultimate source of His will even if He couldn’t will otherwise.

Well, then, might God have willed otherwise in any respect? The majority view in the history of philosophical theology is that He indeed could have. He might have chosen not to create anything at all. And given that He did create, He might have created any number of alternatives to what we observe. But there have been noteworthy thinkers who argued the contrary position, along with others who clearly felt the pull of the contrary position even while resisting it. The most famous such thinker is Leibniz (1710 [1985]), who argued that God, being both perfectly good and perfectly powerful, cannot fail to will the best possible world. Leibniz insisted that this is consistent with saying that God is able to will otherwise, although his defense of this last claim is notoriously difficult to make out satisfactorily. Many read Leibniz, malgré lui , as one whose basic commitments imply that God could not have willed other than He does in any respect.

One might challenge Leibniz’s reasoning on this point by questioning the assumption that there is a uniquely best possible Creation (an option noted by Adams 1987, though he challenges instead Leibniz’s conclusion based on it). One way this could be is if there is no well-ordering of worlds: some pairs of worlds are sufficiently different in kind that they are incommensurate with each other (neither is better than the other, nor are they equal) and no world is better than either of them. Another way this could be is if there is no upper limit on goodness of worlds: for every possible world God might have created, there are others (infinitely many, in fact) which are better. If such is the case, one might argue, it is reasonable for God to arbitrarily choose which world to create from among those worlds exceeding some threshold value of overall goodness.

However, William Rowe (2004) has countered that the thesis that there is no upper limit on goodness of worlds has a very different consequence: it shows that there could not be a morally perfect Creator! For suppose our world has an on-balance moral value of \(n\) and that God chose to create it despite being aware of possibilities having values higher than \(n\) that He was able to create. It seems we can now imagine a morally better Creator: one having the same options who chooses to create a better world. For critical replies to Rowe, see Almeida (2008, ch. 1), Kray (2010), and Zimmerman (2018).

Finally, Norman Kretzmann (1997, 220–25) has argued in the context of Aquinas’s theological system that there is strong pressure to say that God must have created something or other, though it may well have been open to Him to create any of a number of contingent orders. The reason is that there is no plausible account of how an absolutely perfect God might have a resistible motivation—one consideration among other, competing considerations—for creating something rather than nothing. (It obviously cannot have to do with any sort of utility, for example.) The best general understanding of God’s being motivated to create at all—one which in places Aquinas himself comes very close to endorsing—is to see it as reflecting the fact that God’s very being, which is goodness, necessarily diffuses itself. Perfect goodness will naturally communicate itself outwardly; God who is perfect goodness will naturally create, generating a dependent reality that imperfectly reflects that goodness. Wainwright (1996) discusses a somewhat similar line of thought in the Puritan thinker Jonathan Edwards. Alexander Pruss (2016), however, raises substantial grounds for doubt concerning this line of thought; O’Connor (2022) offers a rejoinder.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• The Determinism and Freedom Philosophy Website , edited by Ted Honderich (University College London)
• Bibliography on Free Will , at philpapers.org.

action | agency | blame | causation: the metaphysics of | compatibilism | determinism: causal | fatalism | freedom: divine | free will: divine foreknowledge and | incompatibilism: (nondeterministic) theories of free will | incompatibilism: arguments for | moral responsibility | quantum mechanics | skepticism: about moral responsibility

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Right Now | Give chance a chance

Two Steps to Free Will

September-October 2012

Robert O. Doyle e-mail

Robert O. Doyle website

Astronomy naturally inspires cosmic thinking, but astronomers rarely tackle philosophical issues directly. Theoretical astrophysicist Robert O. Doyle, Ph.D. ’68, associate of the department of astronomy, is an exception. For five years, Doyle has worked on a problem he has pondered since college: the ancient conundrum of free will versus determinism. Do humans choose their actions freely, exercising their own power of will, or do external and prior causes (even the will of God) determine our acts?

Since the pre-Socratics, philosophers have debated whether we live in a deterministic universe, in which “every event has a cause, in a chain of causal events with just one possible future,” or an indeterministic one, in which “there are random (chance) events in a world with many possible futures,” as Doyle writes in Free Will: The Scandal in Philosophy (2011). The way out of the bottle, he says, is a “two-stage model” whose origin he traces to William James, M.D. 1869, LL.D. ’03, philosopher, psychologist, and perhaps the most famous of all Harvard’s professors.

Some of the confusion, Doyle believes, stems from how thinkers have framed the question—in an either/or way that allows only a rigidly predetermined universe or a chaotic one totally at the mercy of chance. David Hume, for example, asserted that there is “no medium betwixt chance and an absolute necessity.” But Doyle also finds the term “free will” unclear and even unintelligible, because the condition of “freedom” applies to the agent of action, not the will: “I think the question is not proper, whether the will be free, but whether a man be free,” in John Locke’s concise phrasing. “The element of randomness doesn’t make us random,” Doyle says. “It just gives us possibilities.”

Doyle limns a two-stage model in which chance presents a variety of alternative possibilities to the human actor, who selects one of these options and enacts it. “Free will isn’t one monolithic thing,” he says. “It’s a combination of the free element with selection.” He finds many antecedents in the history of philosophy—beginning with Aristotle, whom he calls the first indeterminist. But he identifies James as the first philosopher to clearly articulate such a model of free will, and (in a 2010 paper published in the journal William James Studies and presented at a conference honoring James; see “William James: Summers and Semesters” ) he honors that seminal work by naming such a model—“first chance, then choice”—“Jamesian” free will.

In 1870, James famously declared himself for free will. In a diary entry for April 30, he wrote, “I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier’s [French philosopher Charles Renouvier, 1815-1903] second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will—‘the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts’—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”

James identified chance as the source of “ambiguous possibilities” and “alternative futures.” “ Chance is not the direct cause of actions, ” writes Doyle. “James makes it clear that it is his choice that ‘grants consent’ to one of them [alternatives].” In an 1884 lecture, “The Dilemma of Determinism,” James challenged some Harvard divinity students to ponder his choice of a route home after the talk. “What is meant by saying that my choice of which way to walk home after the lecture is ambiguous and a matter of chance?....It means that both Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street are called but only one, and that one either one, shall be chosen. The notion of alternative possibility…is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance.”

Chance and randomness, however, are concepts that make many academics uncomfortable. “Philosophers and mathematicians hate probability,” says Doyle. “All the great mathematicians—Laplace and Gauss, for example—did not believe chance was real. ‘Laws of chance,’ as they call probability—are only able to describe events, but there is no real chance, because God clearly knows what’s going to happen. Most of these thinkers—centuries ago—were very religious. And even today mathematicians like to think someday we’ll discover the ‘laws of chance’—which makes randomness sound regular and lawful.”

In the life sciences, where results depend not only on abstract cerebral processes but data that stream in from nature, chance gets more respect. James was highly conversant with Charles Darwin’s work, in which evolutionary theories embraced random mutations of genes. More recently, German neurobiologist and geneticist Martin Heisenberg (son of physicist Werner Heisenberg, winner of the Nobel Prize for his work on the uncertainty principle) published a 2009 Nature article on free will (with a letter from Doyle), describing how the bacterium Escherichia coli moves in two ways: either tumbling randomly or heading purposefully forward. “This ‘random walk’ [of tumbling] can be modulated by sensory receptors, enabling the bacterium to find food and the right temperature,” Heisenberg writes. Thus, a two-stage process combining chance with choice might even apply at the unicellular level of life.

Quantum physics, by putting physical science on a probabilistic footing, erased any ambitions to remove randomness from its equations. British astrophysicist Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882-1944) even declared, “Now that physics is no longer deterministic—because of quantum physics—the door is open to free will,” reports Doyle. “And the philosophers said to him, ‘What? You think a free electron makes us free?’” Eddington eventually backed off his position, but subsequent decades of work have only strengthened the claims of the quantum model. “Quantum physics makes predictions to 14 decimal places,” Doyle says. “It’s the most accurate of all mathematical physical theories.” Randomness and even free will, it appears, are fully compatible with some highly precise determinations.

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Warren Schmaus, Liberty and the Pursuit of Knowledge: Charles Renouvier's Political Philosophy of Science , University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018, 154pp., $39.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780822945352.

Reviewed by Jeremy Dunham, University of Durham

French philosophy in the nineteenth-century remains a hugely under-researched and rich area of the history of philosophy. Few book-length English language studies of it exist. A recently published anthology on nineteenth-century philosophy makes reference only to Bergson, [1] a philosopher who flourished only at the very tail end of this era. Nonetheless, slowly but surely a number of articles and translations are starting to appear. French philosophers, such as Maine de Biran (1766-1824), Félix Ravaisson (1813-1900), and Clarisse Coignet (1823-1918) are being studied again -- and it is clear that they have important and interesting philosophical things to say on a broad range of issues. Perhaps the most profound and exciting of all the nineteenth-century French philosophers (and certainly the most prolific) is Charles Bernard Renouvier (1815-1903).

William James certainly thought so, and in 1876 wrote to him that:

I am perfectly convinced . . . that you will take your place in the general History of Speculation as the classical and finished representative of the tendency which was begun by Hume, and to which writers before you had made only fragmentary contributions, whilst you have fused the whole matter into a solid, elegant & definitive system, perfectly consistent, and capable by reason of its moral vitality, of becoming popular, so far as that is permitted to philosophic systems . . . you may depend upon it that the name of Renouvier will be as familiar as that of Descartes to the Bachelors of Arts who leave these [Harvard's] walls. [2]

Of course, Renouvier did not find his place in the general history of speculation. In fact, most philosophers -- even historians of nineteenth-century philosophy -- have not heard of him at all. Most of those who have, know him as a footnote to William James's philosophy, or perhaps Durkheim's, rather than a thinker in his own right. [3] The publication of Warren Schmaus's short book on Renouvier as a political philosopher of science, however, might be the first step toward correcting this.

Schmaus's work is not by any means an overview of the full scope of Renouvier's philosophy or an intellectual biography. Renouvier published around twenty-five thousand pages of work, and even more exists in the archives, which makes any such overview a truly gargantuan task. Rather, Schmaus focuses on the relationship between Renouvier's political philosophy and his philosophy of science. Schmaus writes that the book's purpose is to 'rescue Renouvier's reputation and hopefully to encourage others to undertake further study of his philosophy' (xii). I think we can divide this purpose into two missions: (1) the "rescue" mission and (2) the "encouragement" mission. The encouragement mission is achieved by means of the attempt to present Renouvier's philosophy of science as an appealing form of politically structured conventionalism that is free from the charge of conservatism, sometimes levied at more famous but later conventionalists, like Poincaré. The rescue mission addresses the claim that he held conservative views in mathematics and evolutionary theory that prevented him from getting on board with developments in non-Euclidean geometry and Darwinian evolution. If Schmaus is to succeed in the encouragement mission, he needs to show that the conservative views do not follow from a conservative methodology.

Schmaus, during his encouragement mission, presents Renouvier as holding a pluralist view of the sciences according to which an individual science is formed and demarcated by means of a set of postulates agreed upon by a community of scientists. These are practical postulates in the Kantian sense, yet transferred into the theoretical domain. They are indemonstrable, but necessary for empirical research in the particular science to take place. They are what Schmaus calls, in order to move Renouvier into the recognisable history of philosophy of science, "conventions". A rather general but simple example of a convention that all scientists would need to hold on to would be the invariability of natural laws. It is not empirically demonstrable, but still a necessary postulate of scientific empirical inquiry. What makes this conventionalism a political philosophy of science is that the agreement upon such conventions is, according to Renouvier, a kind of social contract. Scientists make an agreement not to challenge certain postulates, concepts, and hypotheses and to restrict their researches within certain boundaries. They come to this agreement in moral and political ways that entail a process of mutual recognition amongst a community of inquirers.

Schmaus presents Renouvier's philosophy of science as in sharp opposition to Auguste Comte's. While Comte believed that science could be used to legitimate certain political orders, Renouvier believed the reverse was true. Science itself can only be legitimized on the basis of certain political structures. Furthermore, it is the political structure behind the agreement of a science's conventions that allows Schmaus to defend Renouvier from the charge of conservativism. Ultimately, Renouvier is a fallibilist and a staunch believer in free will. The epigraph of Schamus's book is an important quote from Renouvier that brings these two aspects of his thought together: "Properly speaking", he writes, "there is no certainty; there are only people who are certain". [4] For Renouvier, there is no magic bell that tolls once we hit on something certain. All we can do is weigh the evidence and make the (free) decision about whether or not we should believe something. Such beliefs are always revisable in light of future evidence. The same is true for the conventions. These hypotheses, concepts, or postulates are justified only insofar as they allow for the progress of science. If they fail to support this, then they should be adjusted or abandoned. Science works best when we recognize this and when individual scientists are able freely to challenge each other and to keep open discussion alive.

Despite this promising philosophy of science, Renouvier held some disappointing views on the developments of science in his day. However, in two chapters on mathematics and evolution, Schmaus does an excellent job of showing that Renouvier's views were nowhere near as indefensible as has been made out in the existing scholarly literature. In these chapters, Schmaus shows an excellent grasp of the relevant history of philosophy and anyone with an existing knowledge of Renouvier's philosophy will find these chapters fascinating. He provides excellent contextualization of Renouvier's arguments and assesses them given the state of knowledge at the time. Importantly, Schmaus shows convincingly that whatever Renouvier's views were, he accepted their provisional nature and at no point tried to block any avenues for future research in these domains. Schmaus's attempt to rescue Renouvier's reputation over these points, therefore, should be regarded as a resounding success.

Those readers who come to the book without prior knowledge of Renouvier's work will, however, no doubt be more interested in the presentation of Renouvier's own philosophy. In the chapters dedicated to this presentation, Schmaus does a good job of providing an appealing overview of it from the perspective of Renouvier's philosophy of science. This is a unique and excellent contribution to the scholarship. Nonetheless, this is done from a fairly high altitude. Schmaus's presentation of Renouvier's theories of freedom, scientific conventions, and his social contract theory are tantalizing, but I would have loved to have read more detail about these issues, as well as a more careful presentation of the philosophical arguments that Renouvier provides in defence of them. Similarly, Schmaus suggests in the introduction that a thorough investigation of Renouvier's model for a philosophy of science might reveal to us a way of thinking more promising than that of his immediate successors, such as James and Durkheim, and our contemporaries, like Philip Kitcher. Yet these tantalizing suggestions remain just that. Schamus says very little about the specifics of the problems with these other theories, or how exactly Renouvier's philosophy might be a better alternative to them.

I am very glad that this book exists. I hope it will be widely read. It does an excellent job of focusing in on one aspect of Renouvier's philosophy and shows that it should be taken very seriously. Beyond what is discussed in it, there is a lot more of Renouvier's work that deserves careful scholarly attention. I hope that this book will inspire more philosophers to look for it.

[1] Shand, John, ed. (2019) A Companion to Nineteenth Century Philosophy . Wiley-Blackwell.

[2] James, William. (1992-2004)  The Correspondence of William James . Volume 4 . I. K. Skrupskelis  et al . (eds.). University of Virginia Press, pp. 541-542.

[3] On Renouvier’s influence on James, see Dunham, Jeremy (2015) "Idealism, Pragmatism, and the Will to Believe".  British Journal for the History of Philosophy.  23(4): 756-778.

[4] Renouvier, Charles (1912). Essais de critique générale. Deuxième essai. Traité de psychologie d’après les principes du criticisme . Volume 1. Paris: Colin, p. 366.

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