ABSTRACT

Classical compatibilism is associated with the thesis that the only freedom worthy of attention is freedom of action, and with the idea of freedom of will being incoherent. Regardless of whether classical compatibilism is better described as forsaking the notion of free will, or instead as offering a deflationary account of it, the classical compatibilists were in agreement that the freedom at issue did not modify a condition of willing. This chapter sets out the classical debate by reference to various historical figures reaching back to the early modern era, but mostly in terms of how the free will debate came to have the shape it did arising out of the heyday of analytic philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. Both compatibilism and incompatibilism have been richly represented in the history of philosophy. Some incompatibilists, it was suggested, assumed that a person's self is distinct from a person's causally influenced character.