Powers and dispositions are all the rage in contemporary analytic metaphysics. i A key feature of the developing anti---Humean approach is that it reverses the presumed direction of fit between behavior and laws. From a dispositional realist perspective, laws hold in virtue of the powers of given kinds of things to effect given kinds of change, not the other way around. It is not laws, but powers - or, some would say, the bearers of powers - that bring about outcomes.Dispositional realism therefore lends itself to a conception of causality as consisting in the display or expression of powers, rather than as anything amounting to sequences, or statements about sequences, regular or not, counterfactual or not. Finally, unlike for the Humean, for dispositional realists the relationship between what something can potentially do and the kind of thing that it is, is one of necessity. This is not to say that a thing must necessarily express its powers ii (let alone that the expression thereof will necessarily issue in an associated effect iii ), only that a thing of a given kind bears the powers of its kind necessarily. iv Jointly, these features of dispositional realism stand to radically reconfigure the debate in analytic philosophy over free will. Or so I aim to show. I begin by establishing what the determinism side of the contemporary free will problematic looks like, from a powers perspective, then do the same for a range of issues associated with the free will side. (To be clear, by "side" I do not mean adherents of one or another position; I mean the constituent categories of the conceptual artifice that is the dichotomy between Humean---inflected determinism and Humean---inflected free will.(Note also that insofar as Kant adheres to a passivist, nomological conception of causation, both Kantian---style determinism in relation to phenomena and Kantian---style escape therefrom count as Humean---inflected for the purposes of the present analysis.) I have made use of the Hegelian term "sublate." To sublate is to re---frame, such that irreconcilable, apparently independent positions may be shown to be misconceived elements of a coherent whole. The claim is that a dispositional realist ontology can be seen to sublate the terms of the free will debate. (Let me also be clear that I do not mean to argue that a powers ontology solves the Humean---inflected problem. I mean to say that it reconfigures it, such that it can be seen to have been ill---conceived in the first place.) As it happens, one consequence of the sublation is a bolstering of the thesis of agent---causation. I therefore end the paper by briefly cataloguing the merits of a dispositional realist version of agent---causation as compared to those of an agent---causal view married to an otherwise---Humean metaphysics.
(i) Powers and DeterminismThe contemporary free will problematic does not hinge upon the designs of God or Fate.It presumes only that at any given time t, it is the case that all future states of the world follow necessarily from present condit...
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