Agency, Freedom, and Responsibility in the Early Heidegger

This book employs Heidegger’s work of the 1920s and early 1930s to develop distinctively Heideggerian accounts of agency, freedom, and responsibility, making the case that Heidegger’s thought provides a compelling alternative to the mainstream philosophical accounts of these concepts.

Hans Pedersen demonstrates that Heidegger’s thought can be fruitfully used to develop a plausible alternative understanding of agency that then avoids the main problems of the standard free will debate. Part I is dedicated to working out a general Heideggerian conception of agency, specifically focusing on the roles of causality, mental states, and deliberation in human agency. In Part II, based on the account of agency worked out in Part I, Pedersen develops Heideggerian accounts of freedom and responsibility that are not based on the causal efficacy of explicit mental states in human action, thereby avoiding the conflict between free will and determinism that gives rise to the standard philosophical debate over free will.