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This article gives an overview of traditional accounts of social freedom (`negative' and `positive') as noninterference with action, and defends their conceptual common ground against recent attacks. Philip Pettit claims that freedom would be better understood as antipower than noninterference. However, it is so far from being the case that accounts of freedom as noninterference and as antipower are necessarily antithetical, that they can in fact be complementary. More specifically, they are not about the same kind of freedom, the first being concerned with free action, but the second with the notion of a free person or a free society. Wayne Norman's arguments against the importance of the notion of free action are subsequently examined and found wanting. In general, we have no good reason for abandoning the post-Isaiah-Berlin conceptual orthodoxy about an analysis of free action being the cornerstone of any viable general theory of freedom.

Featuring critical assessments of Belnap's work, and a paper by the celebrated philosopher himself on case-intensional first order logic, this selection of original research on a much-debated topic charts his impact on the discussion and builds on his ideas.

AbstractAnscombe's "Causality and Determination" is often cited in the contemporary free will debate, but rarely discussed in much detail. It's main contribution, it is thought, is the defense of an alternative to deterministic causation, thus clearing the way for an incompatibilist analysis of free actions in terms of probabilistic causation. However, in this paper I will show that the contemporary probabilistic analysis of free action actually stands in direct conflict with Anscombe's lecture. Instead, I will argue, its true value for incompatibilist accounts of free will lies in Anscombe's thought that there are various fundamentally different kinds of causality. This variety, I argue, allows for a revised conception indeterminism and an understanding of free will as the manifestation of a particular sort of agent-causal power.

Die Frage, ob den Menschen die Willensfreiheit gegeben sei, ist eine uralt-strittige Frage. Sie wird von einigen Neurowissenschaftlern erneut aufgeworfen. Der Artikel setzt sich mit den Argumenten jener Neurowissenschaftler auseinander, die behaupten, die Existenz der Willensfreiheit experimentell falsifiziert zu haben. Um Existenzaussagen machen zu können, muss man über grundsätzliche Existenzmöglichkeiten nachdenken. Dieses Nachdenken nimmt einen großen Teil des Artikels ein. Es werden drei Denkformen unterschieden, die sich durch einen jeweils eigenen Gegenstandsmodus auszeichnen. Wie, so wird anschließend gefragt, lässt sich die Willensfreiheit in diesen Gegenstandsmodi so vergegenständlichen, dass jeweils die Frage ihrer Existenz oder Nicht-Existenz sinnvoll gestellt werden kann. Dabei zeigen sich kennzeichnende Möglichkeiten oder Unmöglichkeiten. So erweist es sich, dass die Willensfreiheit als lebenspraktischer Tatbestand im physischen Kosmos der Neurowissenschaften grundsätzlich keinen gegenständlichen Ort finden kann. Aussagen, die Willensfreiheit gebe es nicht, sind somit innerhalb dieser physischen Denkform tautologisch richtig. Sie empirisch zu belegen, erweist sich als Pseudoempirie. Anders sehen die gegenständlichen Unterbringungsmöglichkeiten in den beiden anderen Denkformen, der semantischen und der phänomenalen, aus. Aber auch im Kosmos der semantischen Denkform gibt es Probleme. Schließlich wird gefragt, wie sich die Gegenstandsentwürfe der drei Denkformen so aufeinander beziehen lassen, dass es aufschlussreich ist, "Wie-ist-es-möglich?"-Fragen aufzuwerfen und zu erforschen.

This paper develops the work of Mary Florence et.al. on centralizer of semiprime semirings and presents reverse centralizer of semirings with several propositions and lemmas. Also introduces the notion of dependent element and free actions on semirings with some results of free action of centralizer and reverse centralizer on semiprime semirings and some another mappings.

AbstractHuman freedom is often characterised as a unique power of self-determination. Accordingly, free human action is often thought to be determined by the agent in some distinctive manner. What is more, this determination is widely assumed to be a kind of efficient-causal determination. In reaction to this efficient-causal-deterministic conception of free human action, this paper argues that if one takes up the understanding of determination and causality that is offered by Anscombe in 'Causality and Determination', and moreover takes up an understanding of free human action that is constrained by Anscombe's account of intentional action in Intention, then an account of free human action as distinctively caused or determined by the agent is untenable. However, the notion of necessitation that Anscombe presents in 'Causality and Determination', which implies neither causality nor determination, offers an attractive alternative account. This alternative account pushes us to reconsider the sense in which human freedom is a power of self-determination, and to acknowledge the limits of our control in free action.