Extract

1 Introduction

Christian List’s crisp and confident new book, Why Free Will is Real, begins with its target clearly lined up in its sights: two epigraphs, from neuroscientist Sam Harris and biologist Jerry Coyne, each proclaiming that contemporary science leaves us with no option but to conclude that free will is an illusion. List’s aim in his book is to develop a naturalistic antidote to this persistent strain of scientistic free-will scepticism. The mistake the sceptics make, according to List, is to suppose that since the conditions on free action aren’t satisfied at the fundamental level, they aren’t satisfied at all. There is more to the world than just what is described by fundamental physics; insofar as the sceptics have failed to find the properties which ground free will, it’s only because they’re looking for them in the wrong place. ‘Free will and its prerequisites’, List concludes, ‘are higher-level phenomena’, and ‘no less real for that’ (p. 5, emphasis in original).

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