Abstract
This paper discusses and compare William James’s and Robert Kane’s theories of free will. In the contemporary discussion on free will, libertarianism is a one of the major positions. Kane is a famous libertarianist, and finds that his theory of free will resembles James’s theory. In fact, Kane is an important researcher of James’ free will theory, and his examination of James’s theory deserves our attention. As we can see, James and Kane have similar positions on the issue of free will, e.g. they are both incompatibilists. However, the methodologies they take to deal with the question ‘how could it be possible that we do have free will?’ have significant differences: James tries to explain free will on the level of self-consciousness, but Kane tries to found the phenomena of free will on neuroscience. In this paper, I first examine James’s and Kane’s theories of free will, give a new interpretation of James’ free will theory, and finally show that in my interpretation James’ theory of free will is more adequate and convincing.