Concept
Kadri Vihvelin
Overview
Kadri Vihvelin is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, best known for her work on metaphysics and ethics, particularly on free will, time travel, causation, counterfactuals, dispositions, and moral responsibility. Vihvelin is the author of Causes, Laws, and Free Will: Why Determinism Doesn’t Matter (Oxford University Press, 2013), a widely cited defense of compatibilism which argues that determinism does not undermine free will. She studied law at the University of Oxford and completed her doctoral dissertation, Ability and being able to do otherwise, at Cornell University in 1989 where her adviser was Robert Stalnaker. Vihvelin made an appearance on Episode 16 of The Free Will Show, a podcast on free will. The interview was later published as a chapter of the associated book (Oxford University Press, 2024).
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
The Positive mode of thought is not necessarily a denial of the supernatural; it merely throws back that question to the origin of all things. If the universe had a beginning, its beginning, by the very conditions of the case, was supernatural; the laws of nature cannot account for their own origin. The Positive philosopher is free to form his opinion on the subject, according to the weight he attaches to the…
John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism
States what Kadri Vihvelin is.
I imagine that more than half of you share our instinctive belief in free-will, and that admiration of it as a principle of dignity has much to do with your fidelity. But free-will has also been discussed pragmatically, and, strangely enough, the same pragmatic interpretation has been put upon it by both disputants. You know how large a part questions of ACCOUNTABILITY have played in ethical controversy. To hear…
William James, Pragmatism
States what Kadri Vihvelin is.
Without this freedom (in the latter and true sense), which alone is practical a priori, no moral law and no moral imputation are possible. Just for this reason the necessity of events in time, according to the physical law of causality, may be called the mechanism of nature, although we do not mean by this that things which are subject to it must be…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason
Close in meaning to Kadri Vihvelin; the term itself is not named.
Related ideas
- Metaphysics
- University of Oxford
- Moral responsibility
- Causality
- Compatibilism
- Robert Stalnaker
- Disposition
- Free will
- Determinism
- Cornell University
- Ethics
Place in the tradition
Part of Compatibilism.