PHIL 100 Lecture Notes - Incompatibilism, Compatibilism, Determinism
17 Sep 2013
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Document Summary
There are two pairs of fundamental questions in the traditional free will debate: We"re going to focus primarily on 1a and 2a. X has free will at a time, t =def. The world is deterministic =def. the complete initial state of the world and the laws of nature determine the exact state of the world at every subsequent point in time. Free will incompatibilism (fwi) is the thesis that if determinism is true, then no one can do otherwise than she in fact does. Free will compatibilism (fwc) is the thesis that it is not the case that if determinism is true, then no one can do otherwise than she in fact does. Here is a line of reasoning that many people who uphold fwi think shows that fwi is true: If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequences of the laws of nature and events in the remote past.
