A landmark book in the debate over free will that makes the case for
compatibilism.
In this landmark 1984 work on free will, Daniel Dennett makes a case for
compatibilism. His aim, as he writes in the preface to this new edition,
was a cleanup job, "saving everything that mattered about the everyday
concept of free will, while jettisoning the impediments." In Elbow
Room, Dennett argues that the varieties of free will worth
wanting--those that underwrite moral and artistic responsibility--are
not threatened by advances in science but distinguished, explained, and
justified in detail.
Dennett tackles the question of free will in a highly original and witty
manner, drawing on the theories and concepts of fields that range from
physics and evolutionary biology to engineering, automata theory, and
artificial intelligence. He shows how the classical formulations of the
problem in philosophy depend on misuses of imagination, and he
disentangles the philosophical problems of real interest from the
"family of anxieties" in which they are often enmeshed--imaginary agents
and bogeymen, including the Peremptory Puppeteer, the Nefarious
Neurosurgeon, and the Cosmic Child Whose Dolls We Are. Putting
sociobiology in its rightful place, he concludes that we can have free
will and science too. He explores reason, control and self-control, the
meaning of "can" and "could have done otherwise," responsibility and
punishment, and why we would want free will in the first place. A fresh
reading of Dennett's book shows how much it can still contribute to
current discussions of free will.
This edition includes as its afterword Dennett's 2012 Erasmus Prize
essay.
