ABSTRACT
The author's views on the contemporary discussion of freewill make impossible a form of determinism which has in the past been the commonest; that of offering a determinist account of action in terms of personal language. He presents a full discussion of determinism in this chapter. The position for which he has argued challenges a libertarian tradition which, since the time of Kant, has argued that which is the bearer of freedom, is a necessarily unknowable metaphysical entity called the self. To reject these versions of determinism and libertarianism is to achieve an important clarification. The problem of freewill raises two suggestions, first, that 'could have done' has a different logic from 'could have been', and secondly, that an appreciation of this logic enables us to dissolve the problem. The author also argues that the first of these suggestions is true, but the second false. The problem in ethics centres not on the notion of action but of responsibility.
