Christian List: Why Free Will is Real

Cover: Why Free Will Is Real in HARDCOVER

Christian List, a professor of political science and philosophy at the London School of Economics, has a new book coming out from Harvard University Press entitled WHY FREE WILL IS REAL.

It won't be available until May from HUP's promo page it looks good.

Unlike the "compatibilists," List isn't redefining free will so that it means something unchallenging. He means by free will that there are in fact alternative possibilities. I might walk down Oak Street on the way home on a certain evening or I might walk down Oak Boulevard. The alternative nature of these possibilities is not simply a matter of our ignorance of the neurological workings of my mind before I start my walk. It is a natural fact about the world I inhabit, as I head down the street, that I could have instead gone down the boulevard.

List's looks likely to be worth a read.

I'm especially happy to observe that the HUP promo page includes a blurb from Robert Kane, my favorite contemporary author on this subject. Kane is in semi-retirement now. Perhaps he has found a younger man to whom to pass on the torch of the voluntarist/incompatibilist position.

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