Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting

This is an old book (1984) with some new comments in a preface and afterword. Despite its age, and as the new additions note, not much has happened with this debate since. New science, new imaging, but not new arguments. Dennett associates like Sam Harris ended up taking the very stances he criticises in this book, and using some of the inherently self-contradictory stances Dennett uses as examples for why hard determinism doesn't seem to work in practice. There's also a lot of referencing Richard Dawkins and his 'selfish gene' and the commingling of these authors pays off in the latter years as Dawkins would reference Dennett when it comes to his stance on free will.

Elbow Room is compatibilist, but not in a strong way (can it be?). In show more fact much of the argumentation here is rather lackadaisical when presenting arguments across the scale. Still, it's pretty thorough and has held up well. show less

More formal philosophy in background would have helped. Everything he said was well argued and made sense, but he was generally reacting to and responding to quesions in contemporary and historical philosophy.

The first decent moderrn philosophical support for free will. This is shorter and easier reading than his later book "Freedom Evolves".

(Rating: 4.0 /5.0, even)

(Rating: 4.0 /5.0, even)