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 | | Freedom Within Reason by Susan Wolf ISBN-10: 9780195056167 ISBN-10: 0-19-505616-7 ISBN-13: 9780195056167 ISBN-13: 978-0-19-505616-7 Hardcover 1990-12-27 Oxford University Press, USA Find Lowest Price |
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Product Description Philosophers typically see the issue of free will and determinism in terms of a debate between two standard positions. Incompatibilism holds that freedom and responsibility require causal and metaphysical independence from the impersonal forces of nature. According to compatibilism, people are free and responsible as long as their actions are governed by their desires. In Freedom Within Reason, Susan Wolf charts a path between these traditional positions: We are not free and responsible, she argues, for actions that are governed by desires that we cannot help having. But the wish to form our own desires from nothing is both futile and arbitrary. Some of the forces beyond our control are friends to freedom rather than enemies of it: they endow us with faculties of reason, perception, and imagination, and provide us with the data by which we come to see and appreciate the world for what it is. The independence we want, Wolf argues, is not independence from the world, but independence from forces that prevent or preclude us from choosing how to live in light of a sufficient appreciation of the world. The freedom we want is a freedom within reason and the world. | ||
Reviews | ||
a paean to "goodness"... Only a philosopher ineluctably wed to rationalism could conceive of a title like FREEDOM WITHIN REASON without intending irony. I just love it when philosophers, comfortable in their belief of self-superiority, make statements like, "...and so we see that ordinary people are perhaps justified in thinking that they can make up their own minds about important moral issues..." (paraphrasing). Rehashed ethical humanism, old fish. | ||
An Original and Well Reasoned View Wolf's book, now over ten years old, is a standout in recent literature on free will. She approaches the question from the angle of autonomy rather than the usual determinism angel. This is a refreshing and insightful approach to the long standing problem, not least because of how she clearly relates the former problem to the latter. Her own theory, the 'Reason View,' has much to recomend it. I am inclined towards suggesting that it makes a valuable addition to what she calls the 'Real Self Views' (that of Watson, Neely, often Frankfurt and others) rather than the stronger claim that she has disproved those other theories and put in their place a new theory, which she seems to suggest. And her demolition of the incompatibilist autonomous view is complete. Excellent and thought-provoking philosophy | ||