The problem of sourcehood in the libertarian accounts of John Searle and Robert Kane

Abstract

Free will is one of the most hotly debated issues in the history of philosophy, which also caused a lot of confusions in the minds of people who are arguing about it. In this thesis, I will mainly focus on the sourcehood problem in John Searle and Robert Kane’s ideas concerning the nature of free will. First, the sourcehood principle which we may consider as a simplistic version of agency concepts becomes a quite problematic issue in the light of a) reductive physicalism and b) causal determinism. In Chapter 1, I will touch upon the basic concepts and discussions on free will which are relevant to our main inquiry. Secondly, when we start discovering the basic premises of Searle and Kane, we will be able to see how their ontological assumptions pose serious problems with regard to their libertarian intuitions which they are trying to defend. I will try to show in Chapter 2 that Searle’s biological naturalism (BN) entails epiphenomenalism, and in Chapter 3 that Robert Kane’s Self-Forming Actions fails to provide a sense of agency that exercises any more control than its compatibilist counterparts. I hold that free will, at least, entails top down causation; and it is very hardly to be met by either of the two accounts that I will be discussing throughout this thesis. In Chapter 4, I’ll examine the problems that are brought about by physicalism with regard to any metaphysically persistent sense of selfhood, which I consider to be crucial for libertarianism.