A Wittgensteinian account of free will.

In his later works, Ludwig Wittgenstein characterizes his own philosophy as a form of philosophical therapy. This means that philosophical problems are ‘solved’ not so much by providing a solution to the problem at hand but rather by showing that there is something wrong with the problem itself. A ‘grammatical’ analysis of how language actually works and how meaningful questions can be raised reveals that what we believe to be genuine philosophical problems really have no clear meaning at all. This research project aims to apply Wittgenstein’s therapeutical method to the long standing philosophical problem of free will – something which has not yet been done before. It, thus, investigates the hypothesis that the question whether free will can exist in a deterministic universe constitutes an example of a meaningless question which should be therapeutically dissolved rather than solved. In its critical dimension, this project therapeutically engages with the ongoing academic debate on free will in the analytic tradition and aims to identify how and to what extent this debate is marred by an unwarranted ‘metaphysical’ use of the key concepts of ‘freedom’ and ‘determinism’. In its reconstructive dimension, the project focuses on the legitimate or ‘everyday’ use of these concepts and attempts to show that if ‘meaning is use’ – as Wittgenstein would have it –, then the idea of a possible conflict between determinism and free will cannot be meaningfully formulated.