In everyday life, we take ourselves to be agents who could have decided and, hence, acted differently from how they actually did. However, within contemporary philosophy of action, free will in this robust sense is mostly doubted as it is believed to clash with the fact that humans are part of nature. The substantive and widely shared assumption in the background is that nature is a mechanistic system, governed by deterministic laws. Given the power of this assumption, so-called libertarians struggle hard to defend the existence of free will. Their appeal to indeterminism is contentious and threatens to turn our actions into a matter of chance. It seems that any attempt to naturalise free will and the agency that we take to flow from it will inevitably result in eliminating what we sought to explain.
The project endeavours to offer a way-out of this dilemma by invoking a new bio-processual perspective. The core thesis is that human agency is a (sophisticated) case of bio-agency, and free will a natural means of survival and well-being for bio-agents, both being grounded in the processual constitution of living systems. Drawing on cutting-edge findings in systems biology, neurobiology, behavioural biology and evolutionary biology and engaging with current debates on bio-agency in the philosophy of biology, the project will put forward a metaphysical account that naturalises agency and free will without thereby eliminating them. Humans, like many other organisms, are naturally free thanks to the fundamental plasticity of life that lies halfway between determinism and mere randomness.