Reviews for Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free Will

The average rating for Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free Will based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-09-17 00:00:00 William Madden This book, written by a philosophy professor, consists of an introduction and six chapters. The first five chapters are a tough slog for someone (like me) who is not adept in the sophistications of symbolic logic and the conventions of twentieth-century metaphysical disputation. To such readers, the exercise can seem unintelligible, bizarre, and even irrelevant. Still, there are occasional glimpses of light in the first five chapters, and chapter six brings these intimations into full view. The author is at his best when he presents his own position, not when, as in the earlier chapters, he is engaging in seemingly endless nitpicking with academic friends and foes. And what a position it is! Professor O'Connor stakes out ground that is anathema to most contemporary philosophy professors. He is a proponent of "agent-causation," i.e. the view that conscious thought and action cannot be reduced to the physics of "event-causation," which is the notion that all events - including all conscious thought and action - are part of an inevitable chain of microphysical cause and effect originating with the birth of the universe. Agent-causation recognizes free will. Most advocates of event-causation reject free will or, alternatively, redefine the term to mean something different from what it has meant for millennia. O'Connor observes that the usual academic dismissals of agent-causation do not apply to his particular approach. He does not posit a dichotomy between soul and body in the manner of Cartesian, Kantian, or theological dualism. Rather, volitional agency emerges through natural selection in the course of evolution. Although it is currently unknown how, exactly, this process works, it is the only hypothesis that is consonant with our experience. O'Connor is not a neuroscientist, but his theory is consistent with the neuroscientific writings of William R. (W. R.) Klemm and Peter Ulric Tse. See also the works of astrophysicist and philosopher Bob Doyle. I have reviewed their respective books here, here, and here. I have given a rating of four stars to O'Connor's book as a compromise between my evaluation of the first five chapters, to which I would have assigned three stars, and the sixth chapter, to which I would have awarded five stars.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-11-30 00:00:00 Bryan Wayne Marxists of the world! Before you proclaim yourself entirely post-Marxist! Read this book to remind yourself why reading Marx in a post-1989 world is exciting, and why it's okay to hate Karl Popper and analytic Marxists (and why there is no more need to compromise). The age of vulgar Marxism is over, and Marx is back in style.