Reviewed by David Svolba, Fitchburg State University, USA email: dsvolba@fitchburgstate.edu
Science, Religion and Culture
...e taken as expression of skepticism on Leiter’s part concerning the case for religious tolerance. Leiter affirms the strength of that case in the book’s opening chapter....
Gregg D. Caruso
...ive defense of free will skepticism in the literature. It contains a reworked and expanded version of the view he first developed in Living without Free Will (2001). Important objections to the early book are answered, some slight modifications are introduced, and the overall account is significantly embellished—for example, Pereboom proposes a new account of rational deliberation consistent with the belief that one’s actions are causally determine...
John Martin Fischer
...hat moral responsibility skepticism, at least of his kind, is not as bad as it sounds. Indeed, through his important work culminating (thus far) in this significant book, he has convinced me that the view is subtle, very plausible, and even deeply attractive. Whereas there are other forms of moral responsibility skepticism on the market, Pereboom’s is (in my view) the most fully developed and most appealing. Althoug...
Dana Kay Nelkin
...ee will and determinism, skepticism about free will on a combination of conceptual and empirical grounds, and the thesis that life on the assumption that we do not have free will can be meaningful and perhaps even better in certain important respects than life on the assumption that we have it. At the same time, there are some subtle shifts in particular commitments, new ways of framing certain issues, and detailed responses to a good number of the very many ...
Marcus Mann
...a 21st century religious skepticism characterized by its vitriolic and unapologetic stance toward religion and the moral relativism that the new atheists claim protects it. Following Harris’s example, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins published his book, The God Delusion, cognitive philosopher Daniel Dennett came out with Breaking the Spell and journalist and literary critic Christopher Hitchens concluded the movement’s must-read canon with Go...
Rick Repetti
...ments for free will skepticism in contemporary analytic philosophy: Peter van Inwagen’s consequence argument, which asserts that if choices are lawfully necessary consequences of prior events, then they are unfree; Derk Pereboom’s two arguments for hard incompatibilism: the manipulation argument, which asserts that manipulated choices are unfree, determinism is functionally equivalent to manipulation, and thus determined ch...
