本文主要處理詹姆士和肯恩的自由意志理論。當代討論自由意志的一個主要立場是自由意志主義，其代表人物是肯恩。肯恩發展其理論之際，發現自己與詹姆士的自由意志觀點相似，而且他對於詹姆士理論的評價具有相當的重要性，值得我們注意。可以看到，詹姆士與肯恩對於自由意志的論點，在許多基本立場上是一致的，比如說：他們都認為自由意志與決定論不相容。然而，詹姆士與肯恩在論述「自由意志如何可能」時，他們使用的方法論卻不盡相同：詹姆士試圖從人類的意識層面，來全面地考量自由意志；而肯恩則只從神經科學來分析自由意志。本文將分別討論兩者的理論並做出評價，最終本文將提出一個對於詹姆士理論的新詮釋，並論證在本文的詮釋下，詹姆士的自由意志理論比肯恩理論更適當，而且是一個更足以令人信服的論點。

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.

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