ABSTRACT
One reason that many of the philosophical debates about free will might seem intractable is that different participants in those debates use various terms in ways that not only don’t line up, but might even contradict each other. For instance, it is widely accepted to understand libertarianism as “the conjunction of incompatibilism [the thesis that free will is incompatible with the truth of determinism] and the thesis that we have free will” (van Inwagen 1983: 13f; see also Kane 2001: 17; Pereboom 2006: xiv). (However, for van Inwagen’s later reservations about the use of the term ‘libertarianism,’ see van Inwagen 2008: 331f ). This makes perplexing a number of views that have the name ‘libertarian compatibilism’ (see Vihvelin 2000; Arvan 2013) as on the standard use of the terms involved, this name appears to involve a contradiction.
