Laura Waddell Ekstrom is a contemporary American analytic philosopher and professor at the College of William & Mary, specializing in free will, moral responsibility, and philosophy of religion. She is best known for her coherentist account of agency and her book-length defense of libertarian free will. Her work argues that free will debates are irreducibly entangled with both metaphysical questions about causation and ethical questions about desert and blame.
Authored Free Will: A Philosophical Study (2000), a systematic defense of libertarian free will
Developed a coherentist account of agency grounding freedom in coherence among an agent's desires and values
Argued for the ineliminable intersection of metaphysics and ethics in free will debates
Contributed to philosophy of religion, including work on God, suffering, and prayer
Sustained interdisciplinary engagement connecting action theory with moral responsibility
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