Abstract

This article discusses and compares Donald Davidson’s and Hilary Putnam’s views on free will. Those views have a two-fold motive of interest: first, they are the coherent expressions of the very influential conceptions that these authors held regarding the mind-body relation, causation, the nature of the laws of nature, and the meaning of our explanatory practices; second, both Davidson and Putnam tried to articulate liberal forms of naturalism according to which normative notions are not incompatible with scientifically explainable phenomena but not reducible to them either. In conclusion I will argue that Putnam’s view is the more promising for approaching the free will issue since it is not committed to problematic form of ontological monism still accepted by Davidson.