About

About this site

An independent study site on free will, built around Daniel Dennett's books and the long argument they join. The third of a family, with Philosophy of Time and Philosophy of Mind.

What it is

The starting point is Dennett's view, set out in Elbow Room (1984), Freedom Evolves (2003) and his debate with Gregg Caruso, Just Deserts (2021): that the free will worth wanting is a real, evolved capacity, compatible with a world of causes. The Dennett page follows that case in twelve steps. Each major view of free will then gets a page of its own, setting out the view, the argument for it, and where it meets and parts from Dennett, from his closest allies through twenty-four centuries of history to the scientists and philosophers who reject his picture.

The site is the free will companion to Philosophy of Mind, which follows Dennett on consciousness, and Philosophy of Time, which follows David Deutsch on time. The three questions overlap: whether the future is open, whether there is a self that decides, and what a mind is.

Who made it

Tim Stephenson standing in front of green, steep-sided mountains under low cloud — **Tim Stephenson.**

I'm Tim Stephenson. I made Philosophy of Time to work through David Deutsch's chapter on time, Philosophy of Mind to do the same for consciousness, and this site to follow Dennett on the question his work on the mind always led back to. The site starts from Dennett, but every view here is set out as strongly as I can manage. If you think I have got Dennett, or anyone else, wrong, I would like to know.

Sources and copyright

Dennett's books and the works of other modern authors are in copyright. The site summarises them in its own words and quotes at most one short passage from any copyrighted source on a page.
Where a modern author is set off in a quotation box, the words are our paraphrase, marked "after".
Quotations from Aristotle, Lucretius, Seneca, Augustine, Spinoza, Kant, Laplace, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are our own translations or paraphrases. Hobbes, Hume and William James are quoted from works in the public domain.
Interactive figures are drawn in code for this site. Some, such as the I Spy chart, show the pattern of published results rather than the data, and say so.
Book links on the reading page are plain links, not affiliate links.

Images

The images are public-domain artworks, prints and photographs from Wikimedia Commons, resized to 1280 pixels wide or less. The full list, with a link to each file's Commons page, is below and in art/CREDITS.md.

Image credits
Work	Collection	Source	Used on
Lucas Cranach the Elder, Adam and Eve, 1526	Courtauld Gallery, London	Commons	Home
Sofonisba Anguissola, The Chess Game, 1555	National Museum, Poznań	Commons	Dennett, Videos
Rembrandt, Philosopher in Meditation, 1632	Musée du Louvre	Commons	Thinkers, Compare
William Hogarth, Gin Lane, 1751		Commons	Frankfurt
Rembrandt, The Return of the Prodigal Son, c. 1661–69	Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg	Commons	P. F. Strawson, Videos
Winslow Homer, Breezing Up (A Fair Wind), 1873–76	National Gallery of Art, Washington	Commons	Fischer, Videos
Herbert James Draper, Ulysses and the Sirens, 1909	Ferens Art Gallery, Hull	Commons	Mele
Charles Laplante, Aristotle and His Pupil Alexander, 1866		Commons	Aristotle
Lucretius, De rerum natura, ninth-century manuscript	Leiden University Library, VLF 30	Commons	Epicurus and Lucretius
Peter Paul Rubens, The Death of Seneca, c. 1612–13	Alte Pinakothek, Munich	Commons	The Stoics, Videos
Philippe de Champaigne, Saint Augustine, c. 1645–50	Los Angeles County Museum of Art	Commons	Augustine
Abraham Bosse, frontispiece to Hobbes's Leviathan, 1651	British Library (CC0 scan)	Commons	Hobbes, Videos
Anonymous, Baruch Spinoza, c. 1665	Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel	Commons	Spinoza
Allan Ramsay, David Hume, 1754	Scottish National Portrait Gallery	Commons	Hume
Emil Doerstling, Kant and His Table Companions, 1892–93		Commons	Kant
Jean-Baptiste Paulin Guérin, Pierre-Simon Laplace, 1838	Château de Versailles	Commons	Laplace, Videos
Ludwig Sigismund Ruhl, Arthur Schopenhauer, 1815		Commons	Schopenhauer, Videos
Photograph of William James, early 1900s		Commons	William James
Paul Cézanne, The Black Marble Clock, c. 1869–71	Private collection	Commons	Libet, Videos
"Tables tournantes", L'Illustration, 14 May 1853		Commons	Wegner
Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, 1632	Mauritshuis, The Hague	Commons	Sapolsky, Videos
Annibale Carracci, The Choice of Hercules, 1596	Museo di Capodimonte, Naples	Commons	Kane
Francisco de Goya, Atropos (The Fates), c. 1820–23	Museo del Prado, Madrid	Commons	Van Inwagen
Baron Münchhausen pulls himself out of the swamp, print	Zentralbibliothek Solothurn	Commons	Galen Strawson, Videos
Francisco de Goya, The Straw Manikin, 1791–92	Museo del Prado, Madrid	Commons	Pereboom
Vincent van Gogh, Prisoners Exercising, 1890	Pushkin Museum, Moscow	Commons	Caruso
Odilon Redon, Closed Eyes, 1890	Musée d'Orsay, Paris	Commons	Harris
John Constable, Cloud Study, 1821		Commons	Popper
Viktor Vasnetsov, Knight at the Crossroads, 1882		Commons	Deutsch
Pompeo Batoni, Hercules at the Crossroads, 1742		Commons	Quiz
Johannes Vermeer, The Astronomer, c. 1668	Musée du Louvre	Commons	Lab
Giotto, Justice, c. 1305	Scrovegni Chapel, Padua	Commons	Do we deserve blame?
Carl Spitzweg, The Bookworm, c. 1850		Commons	Glossary, Reading