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Shaun Nichols offers a naturalistic, psychological account of the origins of the problem of free will. He argues that our belief in indeterminist choice is grounded in faulty inference and therefore unjustified, goes on to suggest that there is no single answer to whether free will exists, and promotes a pragmatic approach to prescriptive issues.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Part I: Agency
- 1: The folk psychology of agency
- 2: The indeterminist intuition
- 3: Free will and error
- Part II: Moral responsibility
- 4: Incompatibilism: intuitive and isolated
- 5: Debunking arguments
- 6: Brute retributivism
- 7: After incompatibilism
About the author
Shaun Nichols is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Sentimental Rules: On the Natural Foundations of Moral Judgment (OUP, 2004) and co-author (with Stephen Stich) of Mindreading (OUP, 2003). He is editor of The Architecture of the Imagination (OUP, 2006) and co-editor of Experimental Philosophy (with Joshua Knobe; OUP, 2008; 2014). He has also published over 100 articles at the intersection of philosophy and psychology.
Summary
Shaun Nichols offers a naturalistic, psychological account of the origins of the problem of free will. He argues that our belief in indeterminist choice is grounded in faulty inference and therefore unjustified, goes on to suggest that there is no single answer to whether free will exists, and promotes a pragmatic approach to prescriptive issues.
Additional text
bound advances the discussion in novel and intriguing ways. The result is another valuable contribution from one of the best empirally informed and experimental philosophers around.
