Abstract
Today, the problem of freedom is often framed (consciously or unconsciously) in ways that closely recall the Third antinomy of the Critique of Pure Reason. In particular, when this problem is discussed in the framework of the so-called “scientific naturalism,” it becomes the most relevant case of a more general antinomy that opposes our most cherished beliefs about ourselves (those concerning features such as moral responsibility, agency, consciousness, and intentionality) to what we know from the natural sciences, which do not seem to leave room for those beliefs. The way out from this predicament, it is argued, requires abandoning some of the tenets of contemporary scientific naturalism.
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Notes
- 1.
In 2017, during a conference in his honor in Warsaw, I asked van Inwagen whether he thought that his framing of the free will issue was close to the antinomic presentation that Kant offered in the Dialectic of Critique of Pure Reason, and he said that it certainly was.
- 2.
Actually, we now know that Newton’s mechanics was not an entirely deterministic theory: cf Werndl (2016).
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
It should be noted that determinism does not imply that all events (including human actions) are necessary. It only means that, necessarily, given the past and the laws of nature, the events will happen. In this light, even given the past, in a world with different laws of nature some events that happen in our world do not happen since they are not necessary.
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- 7.
- 8.
Among the deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics, one may remember Bohmian mechanics and Everett’s many-worlds conception (Maudlin 2019).
- 9.
Van Inwagen used that name since in the course of time the philosophical journal Mind has published several important articles defending versions of this argument.
- 10.
For a general presentation on agent causation, see O’Connor (2011).
- 11.
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De Caro, M. (2023). The Third Antinomy in the Age of Naturalism. In: Corti, L., Schülein, JG. (eds) Life, Organisms, and Human Nature. Studies in German Idealism, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41558-6_15
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