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Books

Rationality + Consciousness = Free Will by David Hodgson

Brian D. Earp finds that Rationality + Consciousness = Free Will doesn’t add up.

“By this it appears how necessary it is for any man that aspires to true Knowledge, to examine the Definitions of former Authors; and either to correct them, where they are negligently set down; or to make them himselfe.”
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

Do we have free will or don’t we? Or do we have it in degrees? Is free will compatible with determinism or is it not? What about indeterminism? Following the advice of Hobbes, the first step in any attempt to answer such questions should be to pose another set of questions: What do you mean by ‘free’? By ‘have’ and ‘will’? What is your notion of ‘compatible’? How do you define ‘determinism’? And so on through the list of terms.

David Hodgson is not the first to explore this thicket, but in this book he works less to “examine the Definitions of former Authors” than to “make them himselfe.” Though he does give some broad gestures at foundational texts on free will in the opening chapters of this work, and while he sprinkles references to contemporaries throughout, Hodgson spends the bulk of his time developing his own distinctive account.

Let us try to make some sense, then, of what that account is saying.

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