About this article
Published Online: Mar 06, 2018
Page range: 219 - 243
Received: Jul 27, 2017
Accepted: Feb 11, 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/disp-2017-0005
Keywords
© 2018
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.
Supervenient libertarianism maintains that indeterminism may exist at a supervening agency level, consistent with determinism at a subvening physical level. It seems as if this approach has the potential to break the longstanding deadlock in the free will debate, since it concedes to the traditional incompatibilist that agents can only do otherwise if they can do so in their actual circumstances, holding the past and the laws constant, while nonetheless arguing that this ability is compatible with physical determinism. However, we argue that supervenient libertarianism faces some serious problems, and that it fails to break us free from this deadlock within the free will debate.