ABSTRACT In this dissertation, I occupy two realms of philosophy that have not been commonly associated. On the one hand, I enter into debates about the proper interpretation of Kant, specifically having to do with the very fractured debate on the nature and applications of transcendental idealism. I adjudicate on the matters of the relationship between appearances and things in themselves, i.e. whether it is epistemological or ontological, the way in which TI resolves the antinomial conflict of reason as it thinks the unconditioned in its exploration of cosmological questions, and the way Kant applies TI to articulate the intelligible and empirical characters in his metaphysics of agency. In addition to this historical research, I also turn to contemporary formulations of libertarian freedom. Libertarianism in free will debates is the view that free will is incompatible with determinism (i.e. incompatibilism), and free will exists. Libertarianism is a competitor to compatibilist views that claim that free will is compatible with determinism, i.e. the view that there is a unique outcome given a past and laws of nature characterizing the past. Within libertarianism, there are important differences in terms of the metaphysics of free will. Most contemporary libertarians opt for a reductionist metaphysics, in which causation consists in relationships between events and does not involve underlying grounds or substances. Both event-causal and non-causal libertarianism accordingly ground their views of freedom on the interplay of psychological events conceived of as states of affairs at instants in time. Event-causal accounts locate free will in indeterministic causal series, involve conflicting sets of motivations that resolve themselves probabilistically into a certain kind of action. Non-causal accounts do not attach free will to causality at all, instead associating it with a spontaneously occurring event. ECL and NCL struggle with establishing how the agent actually settles her action. If the action is merely the indeterministic byproduct of a set of psychological processes or process, then what ultimately occurs is not up to the agent but a product of chance. ECL and NCL nevertheless object that even an action settled by chance is done consciously and according to reasons. But these criteria are aligned with compatibilist criteria for free will. Compatibilists deny to the agent the unconditioned power to choose, which is independent of any prior determination but also not subject to chance. They point out, though, that the action is externally unconstrained, or that, if the reasons had been different, the agent would have acted differently. Since contemporary libertarianism deprives the agent of control, and creates a kind of pseudo-agent that acts ultimately according to chance, I explore other metaphysical frameworks for free will. Agent-causal libertarianism involves the agent directly causing her action as a substance. It is not some state of affairs that causes the action—a desire or belief characterizing the agent’s psychology at a certain time—but the agent herself. Agent-causation promises to resolve the problem of control associated with event-causation. The agent-caused action is neither produced deterministically from a prior event, nor is it an indeterministic fallout from probabilistic causation. Instead, it is caused by an agent-substance able to act independently of events. Timothy O’Connor is a well-known and articulate defender of agent-causation, but he also subscribes to the naturalistic framework popular in contemporary metaphysics. Even though he accepts the reality of emergent properties, the agent-cause, which has a special capacity for self-determination, is supposed to be causally united to a microphysical level where there is only passive event-causation. In this dissertation, I seek to frame agent-causation in terms of transcendental idealism. Rather than establishing the level of event-causation as metaphysically fundamental, I explore an idealistic metaphysics in which the empirical world in the spatiotemporal framework of human experience is not an absolute measure of reality. The human person is a hybrid creature, spanning two domains. On the one hand, the person exists in the empirical order in space and time. It is characterized by events subject to a causal law, by which they are accounted for in terms of prior events. On the other hand, there is a deeper level to the person, not encompassed within the limited structures of human experience. On this deep intelligible level, the human person is able to serve as the unconditioned ground of its empirical character. / Philosophy

O problema do Desaparecimento do Agente é uma objeção que tem assolado a Teoria Causal da Ação ao longo da maior parte da sua história contemporânea, mesmo tendo essa teoria se tornado a ortodoxia da explicação de ações. A objeção questiona qual seria o papel do agente, se é que ele teria algum, se apenas seus estados mentais parecem ter um papel causal relevante na produção de ações, como afirma a Teoria Causal da Ação. Essa questão permanece sem resposta satisfatória e recentemente tem originado até mesmo versões recentes do problema do Desaparecimento do Agente que levam o Livre Arbítrio e a consciência em consideração como sendo centrais para o debate. Assim, aceitar a Teoria Causal da Ação requer lidar com o problema em questão. Esse debate se beneficiará do diálogo com a psicologia e a neurociência e, com base nessa troca, eu argumentarei que o problema do Desaparecimento do Agente surge de uma concepção equivocada do que seria um agente humano e qual seria o seu papel na produção de suas ações. Isso se torna claro quando percebemos que essa concepção não corresponde ao nosso conhecimento científico atual a respeito da produção das ações humanas. Aceito isso, eu proponho então uma concepção diferente de agentes que não permite o surgimento do problema do Desaparecimento do Agente. / The problem of the Disappearing Agent is an objection that has haunted the Causal Theory of Action for most of its contemporary history, even if this theory has become the orthodoxy of action explanation. The objection questions what role, if any, is reserved for the agent, if only her mental states seem to have a relevant causal role in the production of action, as the Causal Theory of Action would have it. This question remains unsatisfactorily answered, and has even originated recent versions of the Disappearing Agent issue, which take Free Will and consciousness as being at the center of the debate. Therefore, acceptance of the Causal Theory of Action requires dealing with such problem. This debate will benefit from a dialog with psychology and neuroscience, and based on this exchange I will argue that the issue of the Disappearing Agent springs from a misguided conception of what is a human agent and what is the agents role in the production of her action. This becomes clear when we realize that this conception does not correspond to our current scientific knowledge about the production of human action. Accepting this, I then propose a different conception of agents that does not allow for the Disappearing Agent problem to rise.

O problema do Desaparecimento do Agente é uma objeção que tem assolado a Teoria Causal da Ação ao longo da maior parte da sua história contemporânea, mesmo tendo essa teoria se tornado a ortodoxia da explicação de ações. A objeção questiona qual seria o papel do agente, se é que ele teria algum, se apenas seus estados mentais parecem ter um papel causal relevante na produção de ações, como afirma a Teoria Causal da Ação. Essa questão permanece sem resposta satisfatória e recentemente tem originado até mesmo versões recentes do problema do Desaparecimento do Agente que levam o Livre Arbítrio e a consciência em consideração como sendo centrais para o debate. Assim, aceitar a Teoria Causal da Ação requer lidar com o problema em questão. Esse debate se beneficiará do diálogo com a psicologia e a neurociência e, com base nessa troca, eu argumentarei que o problema do Desaparecimento do Agente surge de uma concepção equivocada do que seria um agente humano e qual seria o seu papel na produção de suas ações. Isso se torna claro quando percebemos que essa concepção não corresponde ao nosso conhecimento científico atual a respeito da produção das ações humanas. Aceito isso, eu proponho então uma concepção diferente de agentes que não permite o surgimento do problema do Desaparecimento do Agente. / The problem of the Disappearing Agent is an objection that has haunted the Causal Theory of Action for most of its contemporary history, even if this theory has become the orthodoxy of action explanation. The objection questions what role, if any, is reserved for the agent, if only her mental states seem to have a relevant causal role in the production of action, as the Causal Theory of Action would have it. This question remains unsatisfactorily answered, and has even originated recent versions of the Disappearing Agent issue, which take Free Will and consciousness as being at the center of the debate. Therefore, acceptance of the Causal Theory of Action requires dealing with such problem. This debate will benefit from a dialog with psychology and neuroscience, and based on this exchange I will argue that the issue of the Disappearing Agent springs from a misguided conception of what is a human agent and what is the agents role in the production of her action. This becomes clear when we realize that this conception does not correspond to our current scientific knowledge about the production of human action. Accepting this, I then propose a different conception of agents that does not allow for the Disappearing Agent problem to rise.

Hypercomputation, which is the general concept embracing all machinery capable of carrying out more tasks than Turing Machines and beyond the Turing Limit, has implications for various fields including mathematics, physics, computer science and philosophy. Regarding its philosophical aspects, it is necessary to reveal the position of hypercomputation relative to the classical computational theory of mind in order to clarify and broaden the scope of hypercomputation so that it encompasses some phenomena which are regarded as problematic because of their property of being uncomputable. This thesis points to a relation between hypercomputation and the agent-causation theory of free will by exploring that theory&#039 / s alleged infinite-regress feature, which has been regarded by some authors as problematic and used against the agent causation theory. In order to cope with this problem, we propose a certain hypercomputer, viz. the reverse Zeus machine. The reverse Zeus machine can help to understand the infinite-regress aspect of agent causation better than accelerating Turing machines (or ordinary Zeus machines). Accelerating Turing machines are abstract machines which perform temporal patterning in an accelerating manner by executing each step in half the time required for the previous step. This allows them to compute infinitely many operations in finite time. Although reverse Zeus machines have the same working principle as accelerating Turing machines, we show that agent causation can be represented by reverse Zeus machines better than by the classical Zeus machines.

The author has attempted a dubbleedged purpose, as indicated by the title. The author firstly deals with Pereboom; begining with his so-called ‘wild coincidence’-argument, by which Pereboom claims agent-causation to be unlikely. The author argues that this argument lacks both scope and strenght. The author then deals with the question of compatiblity between physics and agent-causation as related to Pereboom’s basic problematization; whether agent-causation would or would not diverge from what is expected (from any other event) given our best physical theories. This results in a strong criticism against Pereboom’s whole position, and a positive argument for agent-causation. After the first purpose is achieved, the author turns to the purpose indicated by the subtitle. The author presents a general criticism against the field of metaethics concerning the question of free will. The author also makes suggestions for a possible solution. / Författaren har, som titeln indikerar, tagit på sig ett tveeggat problem. Först hanterar författaren Pereboom; och börjar med hans så kallade ‘wild coincidence’-argument, med vilket Pereboom hävdar att agentkausalitet är osannlik. Författaren menar att detta argument saknar både omfång och styrka. Författaren hanterar sedan frågan om kompatibilitet mellan fysik och agentkausalitet, så som den är relaterad till Perebooms grundläggande problematisering; huruvida agentkausalitet skulle eller inte skulle avvika från vad som vi förväntar oss (givet någon annan händelse) från våra bästa fysiska teorier. Detta resulterar i en stark kritik mot Perebooms hela position, och ett positivt argument för agentkausalitet. Efter att det första syftet är avklarat, så vänder sig författaren till undertitelns syfte. Författaren presenterar en generell kritik mot fältet metaetik avseende frågan om fri vilja. Författaren föreslår även en möjlig lösning på problemet.