For an overview of the debate around free will, The Routledge Companion to Free Will and the Oxford Handbook of Free Will are good companions.
The question of whether we have free will has been debated since the dawn of Western philosophy. However, very interestingly, in classic Eastern philosophy, this subject
is largely absent.
In Western philosophy, the matter is broadly divided into three streams: determinism, compatibility, and libertarianism. The contemporary debate between these produces thousands of scholarly papers a year worldwide. This blog focuses on those scholars that I consider most cutting-edge: the American neuroscientist and determinist Sam Harris; the
American philosopher and compatibilist Daniel Dennett; the Australian legal scholar and libertarian David Hodgson; and the American determinist Greg Caruso.
Harris, Dennett and Caruso debate the issue of free will regularly. David Hodgson is interesting because he was an Australian, was a judge most of his life, and had a
keen interest in the matter of free will in connection with the law.
Sam Harris’s bestseller Free Will and the conversations Harris has had with the compatibilist Daniel Dennett on his podcast Making Sense were influential in the research for this book, as were Harris’s podcast and App Waking Up, which frequently releases publications and
interviews with a variety of scholars on subjects such as free will and the self.
Compatibilism is the reigning view among philosophers, just over 59 per cent, with libertarians coming second at 13 per cent and hard determinists at only 12 per cent.
Harris and Dennett; two of the four horsemen of the new atheism
In 2007, at the beginning of the new atheist movement, the philosophers who later became known as “the four horsemen” or “the heralds of religions’ unravelling” – Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett – met for a conversation. This exchange was filmed, and the video went viral on YouTube. The transcript of the famous conversation was bundled in a book, with essays by three of the participants, Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett, and an introduction by Stephen Fry. Hitchens had died before the book was published. The surviving philosophers have continued to meet for debates on the causes of human behaviour.
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