Free Will — From Latin liberum arbitrium. The capacity attributed to an agent to choose and act in a manner not entirely determined by antecedent causes. The problem of free will is among the most persistent in philosophy, intertwining metaphysics, ethics, and theology. Augustine formulates the question in the Christian context: if God is omniscient and omnipotent, how can humans be free and responsible for sin? His solution — free will as a divine gift corrupted by the Fall — is taken up and radicalised in the Luther–Erasmus dispute. In modernity, Kant distinguishes transcendental freedom (the spontaneity of reason in the noumenal realm) from practical freedom (the autonomy of the will under the moral law). Schopenhauer denies empirical free will: character is immutable and motives necessarily determine action — only the will as thing-in-itself is free. In contemporary analytic debate, Harry Frankfurt proposes that freedom consists in the capacity to reflectively endorse one’s own desires (second-order desires), regardless of causal determinism.
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