Abstract

George Lyons criticizes as essentially rationalistic both the Objectivist concept of free will in Tibor Machan's Initiative: Human Agency and Society, and William Dwyer 's determinism in the compatibilist tradition derived from Hobbes. He draws attention to the general problem of compatibilism in modern philosophy. He focuses on how such scientific theorists as Daniel C. Dennett have gone beyond the ideas of Hobbes, in considering the complexities of action in evolutionary processes discovered by Darwin.