Provides a comprehensive, cutting-edge, and accessible accompaniment to various narratives about free will A Companion to Free Will is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the philosophy of free will, offering an authoritative survey of perennial issues and contemporary debates within the field. Bringing together the work of a diverse team of established and younger scholars, this well-balanced volume offers innovative perspectives and fresh approaches to the classical compatibility problem, moral and legal responsibility, consciousness in free action, action theory, determinism, logical fatalism, impossibilism, and much more. The Companion’s 30 chapters provide general coverage of the discipline as well as an in-depth exploration of both CAP (Classical Analytic Paradigm) and non-CAP perspectives on the problem of free will and the problem of determinism—raising new questions about what the free will debate is, or should be, about. Throughout the book, coverage of modern exchanges between the world’s leading philosophers is complemented by incisive commentary, novel insights, and selections that examine compatibilist, libertarian, and denialist viewpoints. Offers a balanced presentation of conflicting theories and ongoing debates about the nature, existence, and implications of free will Explores the role of scientific advances and empirical methods in contributing to discourses on free will and action theory Reviews new developments in longstanding arguments between compatibilist and incompatibilist approaches to free will including those that question this way of framing the debate and critique the standard terminology Discusses descriptive, revisionary, and pragmatic approaches for defining key concepts and addressing compatibility problems surrounding free will Considers various issues of moral responsibility and philosophical approaches to the problem of free will in new ways Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series, A Companion to Free Will is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students of philosophy, professional philosophers and theorists, and interested novices alike.

Reflections on the metaphysics and epistemology of classification from a distinguished group of philosophers. Contemporary discussions of the success of science often invoke an ancient metaphor from Plato's Phaedrus: successful theories should "carve nature at its joints." But is nature really "jointed"? Are there natural kinds of things around which our theories cut? The essays in this volume offer reflections by a distinguished group of philosophers on a series of intertwined issues in the metaphysics and epistemology of classification. The contributors consider such topics as the relevance of natural kinds in inductive inference; the role of natural kinds in natural laws; the nature of fundamental properties; the naturalness of boundaries; the metaphysics and epistemology of biological kinds; and the relevance of biological kinds to certain questions in ethics. Carving Nature at Its Joints offers both breadth and thematic unity, providing a sampling of state-of-the-art work in contemporary analytic philosophy that will be of interest to a wide audience of scholars and students concerned with classification.

Leading philosophers explore responsibility from a variety of perspectives, including metaphysics, action theory, and philosophy of law. Most philosophical explorations of responsibility discuss the topic solely in terms of metaphysics and the "free will" problem. By contrast, these essays by leading philosophers view responsibility from a variety of perspectives-metaphysics, ethics, action theory, and the philosophy of law. After a broad, framing introduction by the volume's editors, the contributors consider such subjects as responsibility as it relates to the "free will" problem; the relation between responsibility and knowledge or ignorance; the relation between causal and moral responsibility; the difference, if any, between responsibility for actions and responsibility for omissions; the metaphysical requirements for making sense of "collective" responsibility; and the relation between moral and legal responsibility. The contributors include such distinguished authors as Alfred R. Mele, John Martin Fischer, George Sher, and Frances Kamm, as well as important rising scholars. Taken together, the essays in Action, Ethics, and Responsibility offer a breadth of perspectives that is unmatched by other treatments of the topic. Contributors Joseph Keim Campbell, David Chan, Randolph Clarke, E.J. Coffman, John Martin Fischer, Helen Frowe, Todd Jones, Frances Kamm, Antti Kauppinen, Alfred R. Mele, Michael O'Rourke, Paul Russell, Robert F. Schopp, George Sher, Harry S. Silverstein, Saul Smilansky, Donald Smith, Charles T. Wolfe

Original essays on the metaphysics of time, identity, and the self, written by distinguished scholars and important rising philosophers. The concepts of time and identity seem at once unproblematic and frustratingly difficult. Time is an intricate part of our experience-it would seem that the passage of time is a prerequisite for having any experience at all-and yet recalcitrant questions about time remain. Is time real? Does time flow? Do past and future moments exist? Philosophers face similarly stubborn questions about identity, particularly about the persistence of identical entities through change. Indeed, questions about the metaphysics of persistence take on many of the complexities inherent in philosophical considerations of time. This volume of original essays brings together these two essentially related concepts in a way not reflected in the available literature, making it required reading for philosophers working in metaphysics and students interested in these topics. The contributors, distinguished authors and rising scholars, first consider the nature of time and then turn to the relation of identity, focusing on the metaphysical connections between the two, with a special emphasis on personal identity. The volume concludes with essays on the metaphysics of death, issues in which time and identity play a significant role. This groundbreaking collection offers both cutting-edge epistemological analysis and historical perspectives on contemporary topics. Contributors Harriet Baber, Lynne Rudder Baker, Ben Bradley, John W. Carroll, Reinaldo Elugardo, Geoffrey Gorham, Mark Hinchliff, Jenann Ismael, Barbara Levenbook, Andrew Light, Lawrence B. Lombard, Ned Markosian, Harold Noonan, John Perry, Harry S. Silverstein, Matthew H. Slater, Robert J. Stainton, Neil A. Tognazzini