2025.03.5 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Robert Kane, The Complex Tapestry of Free Will: A Free Will Odyssey, Oxford University Press, 2024, 376pp., $120.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780197751404
Reviewed by David Palmer, University of Tennessee
According to libertarian views of free will, people sometimes act freely, but this freedom is incompatible with causal determinism. While attractive to many, philosophers have long been skeptical of such views. Two concerns have been central: (i) How can a person have control over an undetermined action? Wouldn’t it just be a matter of chance that such an action occurs? (ii) How can a person’s free actions be breaks in the deterministic causal chain? As Robert Kane notes, historical ways of explaining this have typically appealed to “mysterious” (3) forms of agency—like uncaused actions or Kantian noumenal selves—that somehow stand “outside” the laws of nature. Little wonder, then, that P. F. Strawson (1962) famously dismissed libertarian views as “obscure and panicky metaphysics.”
In the face…
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