Abstract:

One of the central problems within the free will debate consists in the seeming incompatibility of an agent's ability to do otherwise and determinism. Recently, compatibilist libertarianism has been proposed as an actualist position intended to finally reconcile both. Compatibilist libertarianism claims that free will is possible as a higher-level phenomenon even if the fundamental physical level is governed by determinism. I will argue that this position is rather a version of classical compatibilism than a version of libertarianism. Though this is an undesired consequence for proponents of compatibilist libertarianism at first glance, I will also argue that it is not that bad. In particular, I will show that recent objections against compatibilist libertarianism can be avoided by embracing its compatibilist nature. Therefore, compatibilist libertarianism might very well be the position closest to an actualist account of free will in a deterministic world that one can hope to get.

Speaker:
Maria Sekatskaya is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, DCLPS. She defended her Ph.D. dissertation and worked as a senior lecturer at the Saint Petersburg State University (Russia). Maria Sekatskaya was a visiting scholar at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), the University of California, Berkeley (USA), and the University of Mainz. Her main research interests are in philosophy of mind and metaphysics, with a special emphasis on the problems of free will and personal identity.