Title: Peter van Inwagen
Headings: Peter van Inwagen
Peter van Inwagen
Incompatibilism
Van Inwagen Changes the Subject
The Consequence Argument and Mind Argument
Free Will Remains a Mystery for van Inwagen
Van Inwagen, Kane, and Compatibilism compared to the Cogito Model
How to Think about the Problem of Free Will
The Metaphysics of Material Composition
What van Inwagen calls his Special Composition Question is
The Doctrine of Arbitrary Undetached Parts

Content: that free will and determinism are incompatible. Indeed many philosophers hold not only that free will is compatible with determinism but that free will entails determinism. I think it would be fair to say that almost all the philosophical writing on the problem of free will and determinism since the time of Hobbes that is any good, that is of any enduring philosophical interest, has been about this presupposition of the earlier debates about liberty and necessity. It is for this reason that nowadays one must accept as a fait accompli that the problem of finding out whether free will and determinism are compatible is a large part, perhaps the major part, of "the problem of free will and determinism". (Essay on Free Will, p.1)
Van Inwagen Changes the Subject
Just as Peter. F. Strawson in 1962 changed the subject from the existence of free will, from the question of whether determinism or indeterminism is true, and just as Harry Frankfurt changed the debate to the question of the existence of alternative possibilities, so Peter van Inwagen made a major change, at least in the terminology, to the question of whether free will and determinism are compatible, indeed whether free will entails determinism, as he says above. Van Inwagen replaces the Traditional Problem of "liberty and necessity," finding out whether determinism is true or false, and thus whether or not we have free will, with a new problem that he calls the Compatibility Problem. I shall attempt to formulate the problem in a way that takes account of this fait accompli by dividing the problem into two problems, which I will call the Compatibility Problem and the Traditional Problem. The Traditional Problem is, of course, the problem of finding out whether we have free will or whether determinism is true. But the very existence of the Traditional Problem depends upon the correct solution to the Compatibility Problem: