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For a half - century, I have been developing a view of free will that is incompatible with determinism and, in the process, attempting to answer the Intelligibility Question about such a free will: Can one make sense of an incompatibilist or libertarian free will without reducing it to mere chance, or mystery, and can such a free will be reconciled with modern views of the cosmos and human beings? In this paper, I discuss recent refinements to my earlier writings on such a view, refinements developed in recent years in response to the large critical literature on my views in the past several decades. My view has usually been designated an event-causal (EC) view of libertarian free will and distinguished from non-causal (NC) and agent-causal (AC) libertarian views. But I was never happy with this designation of my view as “event-causal” and did not use it myself in earlier writings. In this paper, I explain why I now reject it altogether. I have come to believe that to avoid numerous misunderstandings in current debates about free will, we must distinguish four different kinds of libertarian theories, not merely three: in addition to non-causal (NC), agent-causal (AC), and event-causal (EC) theories, we need to add a fourth kind, which might be called an agent-causal/event-causal (AC/EC) theory. My view has always been of this fourth kind. It represents what I call in the title of this paper the “fourth way forward” for making sense of an incompatibilist free will.

Panentheism and pantheism represent one of the most profound, even startling parallels across the world’s great metaphysical traditions about which the present article seeks to explore and carry out a comparative study of certain Eastern and Western philosophers with special reference to the views of two chief exponents of Advaita Vedanta of Indian philosophy, Shankara and Ramanuja. Both these terms, touch on the relation of God and the universe with the difference that the former seems to be rigid, motionless, and abstract and lacks a kind of religious fervor in its approach, while the latter is presumed to be concrete and palpable and seeks to reconcile philosophical thinking with the demands of religious feelings as well. God in pantheism is compared to the God of Spinoza, the Neutrum of Schelling, and Shankara's concept of indeterminate Brahman. In contrast, in the West Hegelian Absolute, and Ramanuja's qualified Brahman in Indian tradition, both are accredited with panentheism in which a personal God, identity-in-and-through-difference, has all auspicious qualities. Though these philosophers are from totally different temperaments and cultures, their philosophical method has certain similarities that have been examined in this work.

In Reason and the Heart , William Wainwright defends a kind of religious evidentialism, one that takes int consideration the promptings of the heart, provided the heart is a virtuous one; and he claims that this view is able to avoid relativism. Here, Wainwright’s evidentialism is examined in relation to other views that have gone by that name. Wainwright’s position is briefly stated together with an expression of doubt about its ability to fend off relativism. Following this, an outline of the history of evidentialism is presented. It is concluded that Wainwright’s view is not really a form of evidentialism at all. Evidentialism may be weakened in two ways: (1) redefining “evidence” to include elements that are not recognized by objectifying inquiry; (2) allowing subjective factors, such as religious emotions, to govern the interpretation of the evidence. Wainwright describes his view as a form of evidentialism because it does not avail itself of (1); but it is only misleadingly called “evidentialism” because of (2). After making this case, several reasons are presented for rejecting evidentialism. It is argued that evidentialists focus attention of what the evidence is to determine whether beliefs are justified or rational, while how the evidence is treated is of no less importance when beliefs are supported by reasons. Furthermore, there are beliefs the justification of which is a practical matter of commitment to a more general framework rather than inference from some body of evidence. It is suggested that some religious beliefs may fall into this category.