ABSTRACT
It is this first-person phenomenology of the exercise of free will that seems so intuitively convincing to the libertarian, as the philosophical advocate of free will is called. The philosophical libertarian claims we have free will; the determinist claims we do not. The determinist, however, has a reply. What is being described is simply what it feels like for a conscious mind to be undergoing certain trains of mental events, i.e., brain events. Somewhat ironically perhaps, some accounts, by fiction-writers themselves, of the phenomenon of literary inspiration play down the phenomenon of ‘feeling as though one is doing something by exercising one’s free will’. Yet the countervailing phenomenological evidence for the exercise of free will is compelling from other quarters. Deprived of the ‘introspective phenomenology argument’ for free will, the libertarian can try another tack.
