A quiz

Where do you stand?

Twelve statements about free will. Say whether you agree, and see how close you are to Daniel Dennett, which thinkers on this site are nearest to you, and exactly where you part company with him.

The young Hercules, seated with his club, looks towards a helmeted woman who points upwards to a temple on a hill, while a half-dressed woman reclines beside him offering pleasures — Pompeo Batoni, *Hercules at the Crossroads*, 1742. Virtue points to the hard road, Pleasure to the easy one. Hercules has to choose. So do you, though here "not sure" is allowed.Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

There are no right answers here, only answers that commit you to things. Dennett's answers are the compatibilist's: determinism does not rule out free will, chance would not help it, and people can deserve blame. The comparisons with other thinkers are our reading of their views, and some of them never addressed some of these questions; where they did not, we leave them out of the match.

About the statements

Each statement is a famous fork in the road. The first is the basic question of compatibilism, which divides Dennett, Hobbes and Hume from Kant, William James and the modern sceptics. The second and ninth are about alternative possibilities, the subject of Frankfurt's counterexamples. The third is about the swerve of Epicurus and the self-forming actions of Kane. The seventh is Galen Strawson's Basic Argument, the tenth the Stoics' lazy argument, and the last P. F. Strawson's reactive attitudes.

Your position on the line is simply how often you agree with Dennett, so the far end means disagreeing with him on almost everything. Remember that there are two ways to be far from him: as a libertarian, like Kane, or as a sceptic, like Sapolsky. Your nearest thinkers will tell you which.