Elbow Room, Daniel C. Dennett
Elbow Room, Daniel C. Dennett
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Elbow Room
The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting

Author: Daniel C. Dennett

Narrator: Don Hagen

Unabridged: 9 hr 54 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Ascent Audio

Published: 01/01/2016


Synopsis

In this landmark 1984 work on free will, Daniel Dennett makes a case for compatibilism. His aim, as he writes in the preface to this new edition, was a cleanup job, "saving everything that mattered about the everyday concept of free will, while jettisoning the impediments." In Elbow Room, Dennett argues that the varieties of free will worth wanting -- those that underwrite moral and artistic responsibility -- are not threatened by advances in science but distinguished, explained, and justified in detail.

Dennett tackles the question of free will in a highly original and witty manner, drawing on the theories and concepts of fields that range from physics and evolutionary biology to engineering, automata theory, and artificial intelligence. He shows how the classical formulations of the problem in philosophy depend on misuses of imagination, and he disentangles the philosophical problems of real interest from the "family of anxieties" in which they are often enmeshed -- imaginary agents and bogeymen, including the Peremptory Puppeteer, the Nefarious Neurosurgeon, and the Cosmic Child Whose Dolls We Are. Putting sociobiology in its rightful place, he concludes that we can have free will and science too. He explores reason, control and self-control, the meaning of "can" and "could have done otherwise," responsibility and punishment, and why we would want free will in the first place. A fresh reading of Dennett's book shows how much it can still contribute to current discussions of free will.

This edition includes as its afterword Dennett's 2012 Erasmus Prize essay.

About Daniel C. Dennett

Daniel C. Dennett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University and the author of numerous books including Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Breaking the Spell, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and Consciousness Explained.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Kevin on June 23, 2023

Brain Yoga Keeping up with Daniel Dennett's train of thought is a bit like herding cats. Just when you think you've got a handle on one postulate he launches another, often in a totally opposite direction. Even with his weirdly exquisite analogies (e.g. frog in a beer mug) I couldn't always wrap my b......more

Goodreads review by Jimmy on May 03, 2011

Determinism does not mean that our fate was determined before we were born. But much of what happens to us in a lifetime is certainly influenced by that. Determinism is not fatalism. For someone to say, "It does not matter what I do, whatever is meant to happen will happen," is quite absurd. And yet......more

Goodreads review by Keith on December 10, 2018

I am a big fan of Dan Dennett. Free will is a very difficult topic to explain and this is a very careful, thoughtful treatment of the subject. I started to write a detailed summary of the book, but decided cut to the basics: This was an early book of his on the topic of consciousness and free will,......more

Goodreads review by Mattia on December 03, 2020

"There's no sense wringing our hands because we can't undo the past, and can't prevent an event that actually happens, and can't create ourselves ex nihilo, and can't choose both alternatives at a decision point, and can't be perfect."......more

Goodreads review by Rob, the Monk on June 07, 2008

Interesting read, but difficult: Dennett writes for the student of Philosophy. Eminently accessible to a person willing to commit, but, as all philosophical writing, commitment it requires. He explores Free Will in terms of Determinism, that is, the proposal that Free Will as we think of it, is an i......more