Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting
Written by Daniel C. Dennett
Narrated by Don Hagen
4/5
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About this audiobook
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.
Daniel C. Dennett
Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor Codirector of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds; Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness; Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting; Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (all published by the MIT Press), From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Mind, and other books.
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Reviews for Elbow Room
65 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I really enjoy the subjects Dennett discusses on his books. However, after reading Consciousness Explained, I think Elbow Room didn't match my expectations in some way, despite being an interesting book.This doesn't mean that I didn't enjoy it. I liked it a lot, and I would recommend it for anybody interested on studying models of Mind, Consciousness and Free Will. However, I think the way Dennett presents his model of Free Will and Determinism can be easily misunderstood by some readers. If I hadn't read other texts by Dennett and Hofstadter about mind and consciousness, probably the book would sound superficial or misguided to me.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The first decent moderrn philosophical support for free will. This is shorter and easier reading than his later book "Freedom Evolves".