Libet’s Experiments and Free Will

Benjamin Libet’s famous experiments, which showed that brain activity precedes the awareness of the intention to carry out simple voluntary motor acts, have forced philosophers to reexamine free will.  Many have taken Libet’s experiments to confirm incompatibilist hard determinist accounts of free will, in which free will is an illusion, or at best compatibilist accounts, in which free will is not what we commonly intuit it to be.  However, others, including Libet himself, have reconciled experimental results with libertarian incompatibilist accounts of freedom.  In this blog post, I present an interpretation of Libet’s experiment which reconciles his experiment with libertarian freedom.  (This is fairly long) 

A Medieval Way of Talking about the Past and Future

 One issue important to both the philosophy of language and the philosophy of time is how statements made about the past and future can be meaningful.  Some philosophers of time, such as Quentin Smith, claim that a referential theory of meaning requires the existence of past and future things in order for statements about them to be meaningful.  This poses a problem for Presentists, as only the present exists simpliciter, making it difficult to explain how statements about the past and future can be meaningful if meaning is somehow connected to reference.

A related issue pertaining to statements made about the past and future concerns the truth-makers of those statements.  What is the truth-maker for the statement “Socrates was put to death in Athens.”  Is the truth-maker found in the presently existing world- such as Socrates bones?  Is it not directly Socrates, but writings about him?  Again, Eternalists can claim that if the fact that Socrates drinks hemlock at a time earlier than the present is still a time that exists simpliciter,  then the truth-maker for the statement can be just that- Socrates drinking hemlock.  Presentists do not have that option, but they can and have appealed to states-of-affairs (Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig), such as the present state-of-affair that Socrates drank hemlock in Athens.