A Spouter's Guide to Basic Readings on Free Will

In a previous post I complained about neuroscientists working with impoverished understandings of the difficult conceptual issues surrounding free will. A couple of folks in the comment section asked what they should take a look at. It seems to me that if the Garden of Forking Paths can’t provide good answers to this question, then we should just shut down the blog.

So, I’ll redirect the question to Gardeners in general: what do you think our colleagues of good will in other departments ought to read if they are interested in getting acquainted with the philosophical issues as they might connect to their own work, or even, the philosophical issues in their own contemporary terms? And don't be bashful! We've got some genuinely interested people following this discussion.

My two cents are below the fold.

I’m inclined to think that where one ought to start depends on what you are trying to get out of the philosophical work on the matter.

For someone interested in getting a good grasp of the current philosophical issues generally in play, it depends on how much one is willing to read. I’m a fan of anthologies, and there are some great introductory anthologies out there (Kane’s Free Will, mentioned by Kevin in the comments thread, and Watson’s Free Will, for example, are widely used current-ish and generally accessible anthologies). There is also the Oxford Handbook on Free Will, ed. Kane, although I tend to think of that as pitched a bit past the introductory level, but also more encyclopedic and footnote-filled for those who are willing to follow the citation trails. To my mind, the general advantage of multi-authored collections is that you tend to get a more balanced or diversely motivated account of the options than you do in a single-authored monograph or even a review or survey article. In that vein, I’m sure few people will be surprised that I’m a fan of Four Views on Free Will, which aspires to cover a good deal of the basic positions and issues in the contemporary literature.

For people specifically interested in how various general issues in the brain/mind sciences map on to some of the broader conceptual issues in the free will debate, there are some recent (2006 and on) options to point to: the Mele, Nahmias, and Roskies pieces cited in the post(s) and attendant comments below, along with (if memory serves) a piece by Nichols in the Are We Free? volume edited by Baer, Kaufman, and Baumeister, all seem to me good places to start. There is, of course, lots more out there that has a more specific focus or a less introductory or interdisciplinary audience in mind.

And, of course, I recommend whatever it is of yours that I failed to mention. Seriously. When people point out, as they invariably do, that I forgot to mention their work it usually strikes me as clearly something I ought to have mentioned. So, please, make liberal use of the comments thread!

A final note: The number of articles coming out in journals every month is, frankly, dismayingly high to even committed readers of the literature. My sense is that we are in something of a transition period for work getting done on free will. So, any collection that is more than a few years old is likely to lack papers covering some of the current developments over the past 5 years. The same goes for any number of otherwise excellent survey articles that have been published in the past 10 years. There is a forthcoming survey article for Philosophy Compass, authored by McKenna and Levy (or vice-versa?) that I’ve seen a draft of and liked a good deal (guys— when is this coming out?), so keep your eyes peeled for that if you are looking to enter into this literature in the not-too-distant future.

Comments

[John Fischer]

I agree with Manuel's suggestions (esp. Four Views!!)

Some other suggestions: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) has many excellent entries on free will-related issues--check the SEP index.

I think the Peter Van Inwagen's An Essay on Free Will is a genuine classic, even though I disagree with much of it. I think this is a book well worth studying and grappling with. It is perhaps not for beginners, but it deals with many important, central issues, and is highly provocative.

[Neil]

I agree with Manuel that we are in a transition period. Here's a bold prediction: the short hand description of the debate as concerning 'free will and determinism' will, like Douglas Adam's description of the hitchhiker's series as a trilogy, become increasingly inaccurate. When my paper with Michael will appear is a good question, one I ask myself frequently. In the meantime, Four Views is an excellent place to start. Bob Kane's recent introduction is fair-minded and generally excellent, though I am reluctant to recommend it to psychologists, largely because he calls his chapter on his event-causal view "Free will and science", which is misleading, to say the least, and might lead scientists to think that philosophers confuse science with speculations about science.

[John Fischer]

I would like to "second" Neil's description of Bob Kane's OUP introductory book as "fair-minded and generally excellent". The book, A CONTEMPORARY INTRODUCTION TO FREE WILL, is in OUP's "Fundamentals of Philsophy Series.
It is highly recommended.

Gary Watson's survey paper in MIND's "State of the Art" series is excellent.

If I may, and I don't wish to be (excessively) curmudgeonly, I'm not sure we're in a major "transition period". In particular, although we definitely benefit from being open-minded about the insights we can gain from empirical work, it is not entirely clear to me that that is the direction of the future work on the interconnected web of issues pertaining to free will, or that, if it is the direction, that it is to be celebrated.

[Neil]

I'm not sure what Manuel means when he says that we're in a transition period, but I certainly don't think that the transition is toward a more empirical approach. I divide my work between empirical philosophy and free will; free will is what I do when I'm not engaged in the empirical work. I think that luck, manipulation and history are all going to be topics that grip us more than determinism and the consequence argument. But perhaps I'm just speaking for myself.

[Joe Campbell]

I always start folks out with essays from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. And, yes, van Inwagen's An Essay on Free Will is still a classic.

[Alan White]

I second John's approval of Watson's 80s Mind survey piece "Free Action and Free Will"--yes, it's that old but still that good as both readable and masterfully sweeping in scope. When I first read the question that article first came to "Mind". :-)

[Cihan]

Hey all,

I especially recommend a recent article by Richard Holton (hat tip: online philosophy papers blog), located here.

It's an attempt to describe what generates incompatibilist intuitions and claims that a misunderstanding of determinism is the scapegoat. I personally connect with this paper in the sense that compatibilism seemed insane the first time I heard it in a freshman introductory humanities lecture - specifically for the reasons Holton identifies. I still am a free-will non-realist but compatibilism doesn't seem all that insane. (More importantly, I am not a lee-way incompatibilist.)

[Bob Doyle]

Hi Joe,

Thanks for the reference to the IEP. I found Kevin Timpe's IEP article on free will, which is excellent - except for his view that indeterminism can only undermine, rather than enhance, an agent’s control over her volitions.

My argument is that chance adds alternative possibilities, so it broadens the agent's options - increases freedom - and supports the creation of new information. And chance APs do not diminish control, since chance is not the direct cause of action.

I then surfed Kevin's home page and discovered his new book, Free Will: Sourcehood and Its Alternatives. I got the book last night and read it cover to cover.

I found it an excellent summary of the last 35 years. Recent debates are not really on FW but on MR (since Peter Strawson changed the subject in 1962, and Harry Frankfurt changed the debate itself in 1969 to argue about AP.

Kevin wants to return to the question of origination, up-to-us-ness, or "sourcehood" as the primary defense of incompatibilism, with AP a corollary that is an indicator of the falsity of determinism.

The book is really clear on a lot of the jargon terms that fly around the garden - like "leeway" above.

I read Four Views, but missed a lot because of the jargon, so I recommend reading Kevin first to get the historical setting, the players, their arguments, and their terminology.

I wrote a review of Kevin's book on the I-Phi Blog.

[Kevin Timpe]

Bob,

Thanks for the kind words about the book and the IEP article. Regarding the claim that in the IEP article I think that indeterminism "can only undermine, rather than enhance, an agent’s control": what I'm trying to do there is simply raise the criticism, not endorse it. As you probably know from the book, I do not think that indeterminism per se undermines free will or moral responsibility.

If people want to follow Bob's suggestion to buy and read my book, I won't object. But I will say that I realize it is unfortunately priced; I had no say on that issue.