-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Stephen Wright, Thinking About Free Will, The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 69, Issue 275, April 2019, Pages 441–443, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqy056
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Readers familiar with Peter van Inwagen's work over the past quarter of a century will find little that is new in Thinking About Free Will. Of the fifteen essays (including the introduction), only one is not published elsewhere. Insofar as the book has a central thesis (and I think it does—more on that later), it is that the Consequence Argument developed in the author's previous work was basically on the right lines, but some bits needed to be made more precise, some bits needed to be changed, and some objections needed fending off.
My sense is that some of the papers are more successful than others. In the chapter ‘Free Will Remains a Mystery’, van Inwagen freely admits that the original version of the β principle has been shown to be invalid by the counterexample developed in McKay & Johnson (1996) and sets about developing an alternative principle. Whilst the new version of the principle is not as intuitively striking, I think that it is serviceable in the way that van Inwagen wants it to be.
