Monday, April 30, 2012

Blackford on Harris on Free Will

Russell Blackford has a very thoughtful review of Sam Harris's Free Will. Like Jerry Coyne, Sam thinks that free will means

  • - We can never act otherwise in the strong and mysterious sense, mainly because this is precluded by the fact, as he sees it, of causal determinism.
  • - We are not "the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present."
 But, Blackford says, this is neither what (many) philosophers mean by free will, nor is it what most people think of by that term. So Sam is attacking a straw man.

Update: See also the thread at Talking Philosophy.

(Fixed the original review link: thanks, Garren!)
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1 comment:

  1. יאיר רזקApril 30, 2012 at 2:36 PM

    Link, man, you forgot the link!

    Thanks, though - an interesting discussion. I tend to side with Sam Harris on this, actually, but still.

    Yair

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