Elbow room: The varieties of free will worth wanting - Hardcover

Dennett, Daniel Clement

3.9

745 ratings by Goodreads

9780262040778: Elbow room: The varieties of free will worth wanting

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262040778 ISBN 13: 9780262040778

Publisher: MIT Press, 1984

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Anyone who has wondered if free will is just an illusion or has asked 'could I have chosen otherwise?' after performing some rash deed will find this book an absorbing discussion of an endlessly fascinating subject. Daniel Dennett, whose previous books include "Brainstorms "and (with Douglas Hofstadter) "The Mind's I, "tackles the free will problem in a highly original and witty manner, drawing on the theories and concepts of several fields usually ignored by philosophers; not just physics and evolutionary biology, but engineering, automata theory, and artificial intelligence. In "Elbow Room, "Dennett 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' they get enmeshed in - imaginary agents, bogeymen, and dire prospects that seem to threaten our freedom. Putting sociobiology in its rightful place, he concludes that we can have free will and science too. "Elbow Room "begins by showing how we can be "moved by reasons" without being exempt from physical causation. It goes on to analyze concepts of control and self-control-concepts often skimped by philosophers but which are central to the questions of free will and determinism. A chapter on "self-made selves" discusses the idea of self or agent to see how it can be kept from disappearing under the onslaught of science. Dennett then sees what can be made of the notion of acting under the idea of freedomdoes the elbow room we think we have really exist? What is an opportunity, and how can anything in our futures be "up to us"? He investigates the meaning of "can" and "could have done otherwise, " andasks why we want free will in the first place. We are wise, Dennett notes, to want free will, but that in itself raises a host of questions about responsibility. In a final chapter, he takes up the problem of how anyone can ever be guilty, and what the rationale is for holding people responsible and even, on occasion, punishing them. Daniel C. Dennett is Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. "Elbow Room "is an expanded version of the John Locke Lectures which he gave at Oxford University in 1983. A Bradford Book.

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About the Author:

Daniel C. Dennett is Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. Elbow Room is an expanded version of the John Locke Lectures which he gave at Oxford University in 1983.

Review:

A spirited and engaging defense of a compatibilist view of free will that has had a significant influence on debates about the topic since its publication thirty years ago. Dennett's characteristically imaginative examples and arguments in this book continue to engage those who agree with his compatibilist position, and to challenge those of us who do not.

(Robert Kane, University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus and Professor of Law, The University of Texas at Austin)

True classics are dazzling when they are written and should be dazzling forever. Daniel Dennett's Elbow Room makes the cut as he captures what a thorough analysis of the problem of free will looks like. Bravo!

(Michael S. Gazzaniga, Professor of Psychology and Director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind, University of California, Santa Barbara)

Elbow Room remains one of the most impressive and engaging defenses of compatibilism about free will and science―in Dennett's conception, the position that our scientific knowledge does not conflict with the kinds of free will worth wanting. In view of the tendency of recent scientific challenges to free will to dismiss compatibilism, this book is even more timely now than when it first appeared.

(Derk Pereboom, Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy, Cornell University)

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