Freedom, Symmetry Breaking and Reflective Judgements. An Attempt at an Incompatibilist Account of Freedom

Abstract

In this paper free volitions are construed as a subclass of reflective judgements in the Kantian meaning, i.e. judgements not involving any fixed concepts but displaying a concept-like form. Judgements expressing volitions and issuing in action may be termed volitional judgements, therefore free volitions are construed as reflective volitional judgements. Due to an element of conceptual novelty and the fact that in a reflective judgement volition gets conceptually fixed out of an unstable equilibrium between different conceptualizations, free volitions thus construed seem to be apt candidates for causally undetermined events.

Keywords

• determinism
• free will
• freedom
• incompatibilism
• kant
• reflective judgement