Originally posted 4/11/22, Revised 6/17/22
Free will is the belief that humans have the ability to act in a purely autonomous manner, unconstrained by external events. For example, when we are presented with a plate of meatballs, we generally have a sense that we have a choice in the decision of whether to eat it or not. The two main stances to take are compatibilism, and incompatibilism. Compatibilists believe that reductionism is correct but that free will is compatible with causal determinisms. Incompatibilists believe that causal determinism is incompatible with free will. There are two types of incompatibilits: hard determinists and libertarians. Libertarians believe that determinism is false and we have free will and hard determinists believe that determinism is true and we lack free will.
The ancient Greek philosophers are typically hard determinists and the modern idealists are typically libertarians. The typical ways of libertarianism is to appeal to something metaphysical. This is indeed where philosophers such as Descartes, Berkeley, and Fichte lie. The general consensus is that in Descartes’ substance dualism, there is no way of reconciling the way the brain interacts with the mind. Thus, the only option according to philosophers such as Fichte are hard determinism and idealism. Idealism gets the job done of preserving free will consistently but it comes at a price- the mind body interaction is changed. Thus, there is no way of knowing how food interacts with the body, for example. Thus, we have the familiar case of the person who is a healthy weight but is malnutritioned. This is actually considered a symptom of bipolar disorder and so bipolar can be seen as one potential symptom of idealism.
So the basic account is that Southern Europeans tend to be hard determinists and northern Europeans tend to be libertarians- once you take recent developments such as compatibilism out of account. But the fact is that most people living in Italy as of present tend to be libertarians coming off of the modern period. There have recently been invented alternative accounts of libertarianism. These include event-causal libertarianism, agent-causal libertarianism, and noncausal-libertarianism. In my opinion these recently developed accounts don’t really make a whole lot of sense. Other ways of preserving free will are through the recently developed quantum mechanics. However, it must be remembered that quantum mechanics is ultimately an instrumental and not a realistic scientific theory. Under realistic interpretations, however, the arguments are at most heuristic.
Idealism Studies 