The Frankfurt-style cases: extinguishing the flickers of freedom

Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 65 (9):1185-1209 (2022)
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Abstract

ABSTRACT The Frankfurt-style Counterexamples (FSCs) to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) have been controversial. I sketch some of the major moves in the debates surrounding the FSCs, and I seek to provide an answer to a big challenge: the indeterministic horn of the ‘dilemma defense’. (Elsewhere I have addressed the deterministic horn.) Given indeterminism (at the relevant places), it is unclear how Black (the counterfactual intervener) can know with certainty what Jones will choose and do in the future; this leaves at least some open alternatives for Jones. I adopt the strategy of positing God in Black’s place (following others, such as David Hunt). The challenge now is to explain how God can have knowledge with certainty of future free human behavior in an indeterministic context, insofar as there is no entailing evidence in available in advance in such a situation. I present the Bootstrapping View of God’s knowledge to solve this problem. If we replace Black with God, we have an indeterministic case in which an agent acts freely, and yet cannot do otherwise. My account of God’s knowledge provides an interpretation of Luis de Molina’s notoriously obscure notion of Supercomprehension.

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John Fischer
University of California, Riverside

Citations of this work

Foreknowledge requires determinism.Patrick Todd - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (1):125-146.
Foreknowledge and Free Will.Linda Zagzebski - 2011 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:online.
An Actual-Sequence Theology.John Martin Fischer - 2022 - Roczniki Filozoficzne 70 (1):49-78.

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References found in this work

The Significance of Free Will.Robert Kane - 1998 - New York, US: Oxford University Press USA.
Causation and Free Will.Carolina Sartorio - 2016 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press UK.
Living without Free Will.Derk Pereboom - 2001 - Philosophical Quarterly 53 (211):308-310.
Are there Counterexamples to the Closure Principle.Jonathan Vogel - 1990 - In Roth Michael & Ross Glenn, Doubting: Contemporary Perspetcives on Scepticism. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 13-29.
Divine omniscience and voluntary action.Nelson Pike - 1965 - Philosophical Review 74 (1):27-46.

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