Thomas Pink

This little book supplies a clear overview and history of the "free will problem" with synopses for the positions of major thinkers up through Kant. The way in which author Pink argued against Thomas Hobbes--whom he classifies as a naturalist compatibilist--made me suspect that I would disagree with his ultimate conclusions, and indeed I did.

As a rule, Pink is anxious to vindicate naive notions of freedom and human action. He seems to assert the possibility of absolute spontaneity in decisions. He blithely postulates a simple personal essence capable of unmotivated yet nonrandom decisions, and he appears satisfied that since such a thing is not categorically disproven, vernacular psychological reflexes should be permitted to consider it true, without the benefit of proof or even a very clear hypothesis about how that could work.

His unwillingness to give serious consideration to non-libertarian accounts is signalled by a failure to entertain proposals for the experience of "free will" other than the actual exercise of a fully autonomous acausal decisive faculty. (Section 19 of Nietzsche's Beyond Good & Evil is an alternative proposal of this sort.)… (more)