Supervenient Freedom and the Free Will Deadlock

Surveying Freedom: Folk Intuitions about Free Will and Moral Responsibility

Philosophers working in the nascent field of ‘experimental philosophy’ have begun using methods borrowed from psychology to collect data about folk intuitions concerning debates ranging from action theory to ethics to epistemology. In this paper we present the results of our attempts to apply this approach to the free will debate, in which philosophers on opposing sides claim that their view be...

Determinism Should Ensure Deadlock-Freedom

This program creates two tasks, f and g, and runs them in parallel. The par statement blocks until both f and g terminate. c is a channel and both a and b are incarnations of c. g takes c by out (reference); any modification of b is therefore reflected in main’s c. f takes c by in (value), and hence f maintains a local copy of c. Suppose f wants to receive the updated value, then it explicitly ...

The Scope of Man's Free Will

Types for Deadlock-freedom: The Synchronous Case

Many di erent notions of \program property", and many di erent methods of verifying such properties, arise naturally in programming. We present a general framework of Speci cation Structures for combining di erent notions and methods in a coherent fashion. We then apply the idea of speci cation structures to concurrency in the setting of Interaction Categories. As a speci c example, a certain s...

Freedom and Weakness of Will

Can absolute freedom of will be defended by arguing that apparent cases of diminished freedom when we act out of passion are cases of weakness of will? Rogers Albritton thought so. What is intriguing about Albritton’s view is that he thought when we act from desire we are making choices, yet our desires are not functioning as reasons for those choices. So our desires must be influencing our cho...