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Carolina Sartorio, University of Arizona

Friday, November 1, 2013 - 3:00pm

Cohen Hall 402

Abstract: Frankfurt-style cases are said to motivate a view of freedom or control that takes freedom to be exclusively a function of actual sequences or causal histories (and not at all a function of the ability to do otherwise, which some take to be incompatible with the truth of determinism). On the other hand, it is common to understand freedom in terms of the concept of reasons-sensitivity, in other words, as the claim that agents who exhibit the relevant kind of control over their acts are those who are sensitive to reasons in the right kind of way. It is notoriously hard to make those two ideas compatible. Here I explain how I think it can be done. I develop a reasons-sensitivity view of freedom that is also an actual-sequence view (a view according to which being free is just a matter of actually acting from the right kinds of causes).

Paper Title

Actual-sequence freedom