Which philosopher has the most convincing opinion on free will?

You're still just jelous that he solved it.

Schopenhauer teebeehach sennpai

Deleuze

Agreed.

Stefan Molyneux

Even if this is bait, I kinda agree with it. Most of the Free Will debates are semantic, or linguistic, confusions. I mean really what do we even mean when we talk about being "free" or point to an entity or action called the "will?"

But if we do take the b8, Pereboom's Hard Incompatabalism is pretty sound, though his apologetics for our judicial system and morality overall are weak. By the commitment of his logic, any moral stance is mere dogma and therefore empty of real deontological content. But, if you wanted to work your way out of this, you could use Nietzsche to say that moral dogma is a very useful dogma and therefore fair game to implement Irl.

Speaking of Nietzsche, I like the implications of his will to power where ultimately, we are ultimately free, but therefore must either submit to some form of morality and castrate ourselves, or exert that absolute freedom to create our own life (so to speak).

Likewise, I dig the Existential commitment of absolute free will where we are totally responsible for our own actions. Just the right mix of philosophy and self-help for me to take the arguments seriously.

But idk famaldingdong, I kinda grew out of worrying about free will once I was out of Intro to Philosophy. Even though it's weak as fuck, and infuriating to say, we act as if we have free will, whether "rightly" or not, we make snap moral judgements, and we know our freedom ends where the nose of another begins, so like just submt to it. We have some semblance of will, or else we wouldnt intuitvely act in moral anger whenever someone commits what we perceive as an injustice. I mean, even someone as philosophically convicted as Calvin kinda embraced the ultimate contradiction between determinism and moral responsibility. He bit the bullet and his theology holds up just fine.

Not sure if Foucault has a perspective on this. I'm sure he could deconstruct the term "free will" historically and illuminate at what point the conversation becomes bankrupt, but like I said I'm just not interested enough to inquire anymore.

Lacan

Agree with you on the last point.
Can you explain your "nature is not Geist" comment to me though? I don't understand.

I'm a philosopleb but I've always found the Freudian idea that much of our actions and behaviors are based on unconscious drives rather than rational decision-making quite compelling.

It's an old decision in German philosophy. Natur is the physical world, the world that can be studied as a dead thing, quantified and chopped up and represented mathematically, everything that goes with the idea of dispassionate science. Geist is the German word meaning spirit, or mind, but also culture. In the 19th century as science became increasingly confident about its ability to explain and thereby understand the world, certain strains of German thought rebelled by asserting that the Geisteswissenschaften, the "human/spiritual/cultural sciences" or humanities, were incapable of reduction to the methods of the Naturwissenschaften. Some of the major figures are Rickert, Windelband, and Dilthey. Dilthey especially prefigured and inspired a lot of 20th century views on this topic, including existential and hermeneutic phenomenology through Heidegger.

You capture my views pretty well. Incompatibilism obviously needs to be taken seriously, but its ethical game is creepily blase about the existential implications. The existentialists are nice but their metaphysic is weak. Existential phenomenology is OK, but the French tend too far toward the Tainian "milieu" side of Geworfenheit for me, and the Germans also lack a good metaphysic and focus too much on petty ethics of "bounded choice" and shit.

Foucault is OK, but he is an extreme milieu guy. He rejects all experiential or phenomenological content, all meaning really, so he would say we can't even talk about what it "means" to be free, or what it is to "feel" free. He rejects transcendental subjectivity and apperception as historically contingent and epistemically limiting. Even the concept of a self-determining or self-creating thing, or a self, he'd probably be 2edgy4u about and deny it. But his overarching ethical project (so he says) is Kantian in that it is a critique of knowledge, except taking the "conditions of the possibility of knowledge" to be historically contingent.

What this says about free will, once this is all said and done and you've exhausted his ouevre?: Precisely fucking nothing. The French are all resignationists who just want to point out how bounded we are.

Sorry, division, not decision.

So let me get this right, they rebelled by saying that humanities could not study things the same as science could? I don't see how that figures into your argument.
Are you saying that since nature is not a spiritual or human entity that it cannot be understood through human means? I don't think that's what you mean but it's all I can extract from your explanation.

You need special tools for studying humanity. The natural sciences work by explanation, Erklären, but the human sciences need methods of understanding (Verstehen). Humans can't be reduced to physical principles, so you can't study humans "from the ground up" as a bundle of physical mechanisms and expect to explain culture, meaning, will, etc. There were attempts to do similar things by Comte and various positivists, people looking immutable or regular laws/mechanisms of human behaviour.

Point being, saying humans are mechanisms in a mechanistic universe doesn't answer the problem of dualism or the experience of subjectivity/volition. It just avoids it.

Derk Pereboom

It avoids it because the problem of dualism is a non-sensical one in a materialistic world view. Subjective experiences and thoughts can easily be accounted for by brain activity. There's no need to posit an extraneous realm of existence and then needing to invent a mechanism to explain reciprocal interaction.

But it's literally not mysticism.