100 Best Free Will Books of All Time

A.J. Jacobs

I don’t believe in free will … Some people see that as depressing but I actually find it liberating because it’s so much easier to forgive yourself for doing stupid things. [source]

Anoop Anthony

"Mere Christianity" is first and foremost a rational book — it is in many ways the opposite of a traditional religious tome. Lewis, who was once an atheist, has been on both sides of the table, and he approaches the notion of God with accessible, clear thinking. The book reveals that experiencing God doesn't have to be a mystical exercise; God can be a concrete and logical conclusion. Lewis was a man of formidable intellect, and he brought it all to bear in this phenomenal book on the rationality of faith. [source]

Paul Russell

Elbow Room was written in 1984 so perhaps it’s getting a bit long in the tooth. However, I selected it because it’s a really good place for readers to start if they want to work their way into the contemporary debate. In terms of style, it’s very accessible and enjoyable. Dennett is a sharp philosopher with an engaging style. The main aim of this book is to debunk or defang the feeling that determinism presents an ominous sceptical threat to freedom and moral responsibility. Dennett sees the free will problem as a problem generated by philosophy. Philosophers abuse what he calls ‘intuition pumps’ and employ misleading philosophical analogies. By these means they generate groundless worries about the implications and consequences of determinism. An example would be, ‘If determinism is true, it would be like being in prison.’ Or ‘If determinism is true, we’re like a robot, mere mechanism.’ Dennett systematically tries to debunk claims of this kind and by doing this he wants to, as he puts it, vindicate a modestly optimistic self-image. In other words, he wants to bring us back to the original common sense view that we talked about at the beginning. In many ways Dennett, who was a student of Gilbert Ryle’s, and in some ways belongs to the Wittgensteinian tradition, simply wants to ‘show the fly the way out of the fly bottle’ on this topic. [source]

Andy Stern

I think it's something that progressives need to think about, because the book talks a lot about two tendencies that people can adopt, to try to find meaning and purpose. One is kind of a sheer technological approach, and the other is more of a spiritual and religious approach. The book talks about the perils and challenges of each way. Sometimes we as progressives defend technology and science and fact, and other people – clearly both progressive and otherwise – appreciate the spiritual more. Then on either extreme, the book tries to say that blind adherence to either tendency also has huge problems. The book, for me, is about trying to seek meaning, not trying to find simple answers, and appreciating that in some ways following a belief to an extreme can be equally as dangerous as having no beliefs. [source]

Paul Russell

I suppose I’m cheating here because I’m squeezing four books into one. However, I would particularly recommend this book to readers, as the four authors of this book — Robert Kane, John Fischer, Derk Pereboom and Manuel Vargas — are all significant figures in the contemporary field and have mapped out distinct and influential positions. The reader can quickly get a sense of the general lie of the land and some of the basic available options. Just to sketch them quickly: Kane is a libertarian, which is to say he’s an incompatibilist who thinks that for us to be free and responsible determinism cannot be true. For this we need an alternative metaphysical framework that accounts for the sort of freedom required for responsibility, which involves more than mere indeterminism. Fischer is a semi-compatibilist. He thinks determinism doesn’t threaten responsibility, but it does threaten free will understood in terms of open alternatives. Fischer argues that we have a rational self-control that involves what he calls ‘reasons responsiveness.’ That ability serves as a foundation for moral responsibility, but falls short of full, metaphysical freedom. Although we don’t have genuine open alternative possibilities, we don’t need them, Fischer argues, for moral responsibility. In several respects this view resembles Dennett’s general strategy, except that Fischer doesn’t buy into the freedom part of it. Rational self-control allows us to recognize reasons and respond to them in a more or less reliable and consistent way, and that’s all that responsibility requires. Pereboom is a hard incompatibilist, or what he sometimes calls an ‘optimistic sceptic.’ According to this view, while we are not free or morally responsible this is not that depressing. We can save most of what we actually care about, including our inter-personal relations, through some form of moral assessment that doesn’t rely on strong moral responsibility. We can, moreover, live lives that are still meaningful and personally satisfying. The supposition that scepticism does not imply pessimism is the main thrust of Pereboom’s line. Vargas calls his position ‘revisionism.’ Roughly what he says is that we should make a basic distinction between what he calls the ‘diagnostic’ understanding of freedom and responsibility — what we ordinarily think freedom and responsibility is — and a ‘prescriptive’ understanding. In our ordinary life, we may well have incompatibilist natural intuitions, and while we may not be able to save those, we can revise our conceptions of freedom and responsibility so that we still retain a suitably robust account that serves all the things we usually care about. Although this is revisionary it’s not radical scepticism. Vargas wants to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater and stops short of unqualified, extreme scepticism. The position we should come back to for a moment is Kane’s. There’s a standard objection to classical libertarianism which is that it relies on ‘spooky metaphysics,’ postulating ghostly agents in some way intervening in the natural order. What makes Kane’s libertarianism interesting is that he argues that libertarians can avoid this and give a naturalistic account of the possibility of moral freedom. The idea here is that what’s caused doesn’t have to be necessitated. Agents can be free as long as there are crucial points in their lives when they are capable of making what Kane calls ‘self-forming’ decisions or actions. What that requires is that free and responsible agents have more than one reason that they can act on in the very same circumstances, and that in those very same circumstances, either reason could move them to act. Whichever way they act, however, they act for a reason. While it is not determined it is still not capricious. In these circumstances, Kane claims, free agents have genuine alternatives and are the ultimate sources of their conduct and character. [source]

Stephane Grand

My favorite book is “Thus spoke Zarathustra” by Friedrich Nietzsche. I do not think I have ever read a book that had more resonance for me. [source]

David Heinemeier Hansson

While most of the 20th century existentialists, like Sartre and Camus, were devout atheists, Kierkegaard is an existentialist obsessed with faith. Fear and Trembling is a very long, and at times obtuse, meditation on the topic of faith and doubt. It uses the story of Abraham and Isaac to contrast the ideas of faith and humanism. Kierkegaard is in awe of Abraham’s faith and how it compels him to sacrifice Isaac, and he uses that to interrogate the topic of faith in general. I found the theological acrobatics employed by Kierkegaard a bit strained, to say the least. But it was a fascinating read none the less, and Kierkegaard’s language and metaphors and incredible depth is inspiring. I’m keen to give this a read in the original Danish form. [source]

Nigel Warburton

Stoicism in its modern form, as described by Massimo Pigliucci, is a philosophy for living. [source]

Paul Russell

This is a highly regarded book, though in terms of the standard free will literature, it’s very different in its approach. Unlike some of the other books I’ve mentioned it’s not an easy book to read. There’s no simple position or model that Williams is interested in articulating. It’s a book that’s focused on ancient Greek conceptions of agency and responsibility. Not only is he interested in the contrast between the ancient Greeks and us, but he’s also interested in the difference between the Greek tragedians — Sophocles, Aeschylus and Homer — on the one hand, and Socrates, Plato and Aristotle on the other, thinkers who are really the founders of the western philosophical tradition. What’s interesting about this book is that it’s not just about free will, it’s also about our views concerning the nature of philosophy. Williams argues that methodologically, philosophers need to be historically sensitive and informed, and that typically they aren’t. That’s a problem with many discussions about free will, there is a lack of historical self-consciousness. One of the great merits of Williams’s book is that he is, among other things, a distinguished scholar of classical literature. Not only is he open to the possibility of learning from history, he also thinks we can learn from literature, and from tragedy in particular. So it’s a very interesting and challenging book. Williams has multiple agendas – including a very ambitious agenda that involves a critique of our whole modern conception of morality. There’s a well entrenched view that the Greeks didn’t have any adequate conception of freedom and responsibility at all. They were, it is suggested, full of primitive views about fate and the gods and the limits of agency and they didn’t really appreciate the importance of intention and voluntariness. On this view, we moderns have managed to get past all this and now, fortunately, have a sophisticated, adequate conception! Williams argues that while the ancient Greeks’ views were certainly very different from ours, and there is no question of going back to the world they lived in, they nevertheless understood and appreciated things that we can still learn a great a deal from. Part of Williams’s project in the book is to suggest that there are very important respects in which the early Greeks were much more realistic about the human predicament as it concerns human agency itself, and in particular our vulnerability to fate and luck as it affects our own moral or ethical lives. [source]

Ryan Holiday

Author

Frankl is one of the most profound modern thinkers on meaning and purpose. His contribution was to change the question from the vague philosophy of “What is the meaning of life?” to man being asked and forced to answer with his actions. He looks at how we find purpose by dedicating ourselves to a cause, learning to love and finding a meaning to our suffering. His other two books on the topic, Will To Meaning and Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning have gems in them as well. [source]

The CEO Library Community (through anonymous form)

One of the best 3 books I've read in 2019 [source]

Ryan Holiday

Author

I really enjoyed the new series of translations that Princeton University Press has done of Cicero and Epictetus and Seneca. They are worth reading for sure. [source]

Malcolm Gladwell

Writer & Journalist

One of the loveliest, most insightful books about social psychology that I ever read. [source]

Paul Russell

This is an important point. While I think it would be too much to say that the free will problem is just the problem of moral responsibility, they are intimately connected. Free will stretches beyond the problem of responsibility, since it touches on our conception of ourselves as creators, individuals and so on but the issue that really matters to us is the problem of our agency in relation to our moral accountability. This is why Wallace’s book is particularly interesting. As the title suggests, Wallace is drawing on a tradition that emphasizes the importance of moral sentiments for understanding this issue. The approach he takes follows that of an influential paper by Peter Strawson, an Oxford philosopher, called “Freedom and Resentment.” The approach here is to begin with an understanding of what it is to hold somebody responsible, where holding somebody responsible is understood as a matter of entertaining certain distinctive kinds of emotions towards them. Those emotions presuppose certain kinds of beliefs about them, and then we try to understand what it is for them to be responsible, by properly understanding the emotions involved in holding people responsible. So we get a better insight into the conditions of responsibility, by examining their foundation in these attitudes and practices. [source]

Bruce Schneier

This book is about the neuroscience of morality. It was published in 2011. This is a brand new field of science, and new discoveries are happening all the time. Morality is the most basic of societal pressures, and Churchland explains how it works. [source]