PHIL 201 Chapter 1: Philosophy notes march 17
Document Summary
Frankfurt, harry g. (1971) freedom of the will and the concept of a person. According to one familiar philosophical tradition, being free is fundamentally a matter of doing what one wants to do. both the doing and the wanting, and the appropriate relation between them as well, require clarification. A person who is free to do what he wants to do may yet not be in a position to have the will he wants. Suppose, however, that he enjoys both freedom of action and freedom of the will. Then he is not only free to do what he wants to do; he is also free to want what he wants to want. Thus, having the freedom to do what one wants to do is not a sufficient condition of having a free will. For to deprive someone of his freedom of action is not necessarily to undermine the freedom of his will.