Free Will: A Very Short Introduction

This little book supplies a clear overview and history of the "free will problem" with synopses for the positions of major thinkers up through Kant. The way in which author Pink argued against Thomas Hobbes--whom he classifies as a naturalist compatibilist--made me suspect that I would disagree with his ultimate conclusions, and indeed I did.

As a rule, Pink is anxious to vindicate naive notions of freedom and human action. He seems to assert the possibility of absolute spontaneity in decisions. He blithely postulates a simple personal essence capable of unmotivated yet nonrandom decisions, and he appears satisfied that since such a thing is not categorically disproven, vernacular psychological reflexes should be permitted to consider it show more true, without the benefit of proof or even a very clear hypothesis about how that could work.

His unwillingness to give serious consideration to non-libertarian accounts is signalled by a failure to entertain proposals for the experience of "free will" other than the actual exercise of a fully autonomous acausal decisive faculty. (Section 19 of Nietzsche's Beyond Good & Evil is an alternative proposal of this sort.) show less

Shame that a book that is supposed to serve as an introduction to a subject is a heavily opinionated piece, of which around ~50% is author's ramblings about why his position can't be disproven (...even though it can). Also I felt like the author is almost aggressive in the way he argues, so it was a pretty uncomfortable read, almost making me feel a second-hand embarassment...

I really enjoyed the beginning though, medieval perception of free will problem and moving to Thomas Hobbes was written well and made me curious about the subject. I ended up with a lot of notes and my own idea of what I think "free will" is or consists of. That I am grateful for.