Congrats to John Fischer, Susan Wolf, and Tom Nagel for writing free will-related books that made it into Eric Schwitzgebel's list of most-cited books in Ethics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Not a bad showing for free will at all.
Now if the list were of the most sighted, I think John would be even higher on that list.
A few people (including some contributors to this site) have queried me about why I excluded philosophy of action, free will, and moral psychology entries from my lists; and about whether I might do a list specifically on those topics.
My answer has to do with the specific purpose for which I composed the lists: To compare rates at which ethics books are stolen, vs. books in philosophy of mind and language. I excluded philosophy of action and moral psychology from the analysis because those areas seemed problematically intermediate between mind and ethics -- though maybe sociologically closer to ethics. And also, now that I have the two lists, I've fulfilled the purpose for which the lists were created -- though others are welcome to manufacture their own lists in different areas!
Given the exclusion of action and moral psychology, the appearance of Fischer and Wolf on the ethics lists is of course all the more impressive.
Posted by: Eric Schwitzgebel | November 28, 2006 at 12:11 PM
To clarify: I excluded SEP entries on action and moral psychology, not books. So if a book on free will made it into a lot of straight ethics entries, it made my list.
Posted by: Eric Schwitzgebel | November 28, 2006 at 12:13 PM