Description: Shaun Nichols offers a naturalistic, psychological account of the origins of the problem of free will. He argues that our belief in indeterminist choice is grounded in faulty inference and therefore unjustified, goes on to suggest that there is no single answer to whether free will exists, and promotes a pragmatic approach to prescriptive issues.
Review Quotes:
"What is manifestly true is that this book is worth the careful attention of anyone interested in moral psychology, moral responsibility, or the methodological issues that constrain philosophical debates. At the heart of Nichols' theory is a picture of moral responsibility as a deeply human practice, one that plays an important moral and practical role in our lives." --Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Online
"Few philosophy books are as diversely valuable to the discipline as this engaging volume on free will...scholars at the highest levels will be seriously interested in Nichols's techniques, which rely on experimental philosophy to analyze the psychological motivations for the inferences and positions in the classic free will debate. The prose is lucid, the book is well organized, and the science and philosophy are seamlessly integrated...Essential."
-- Choice
..".Nichols work is an invaluable asset, bringing together recent work in psychology and experimental philosophy and analyzing them in the context of the free will debate." -- Metapsychology Online Reviews