Thinking about Free Will

Peter van Inwagen is the John Cardinal O'Hara Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He is the author of An Essay on Free Will (1983), and his numerous other publications include Material Beings (1990), Ontology, Identity, and Modality: Essays in Metaphysics (Cambridge, 2002), The Problem of Evil (2006), and Existence: Essays in Ontology (Cambridge, 2014).

• Preface; Introduction; 1. Ability and responsibility; 2. On two arguments for compatibilism; 3. Compatibilistic reflections; 4. Critical study of Dennett's Elbow Room; 5. When is the will free?; 6. Moral responsibility, determinism, and the ability to do otherwise; 7. Free will remains a mystery; 8. Genes, statistics, and desert; 9. Freedom to break the laws; 10. How to think about the problem of free will; 11. A promising argument; 12. Preface to the French translation of An Essay on Free Will; 13. The problem of fr** w*ll; 14. Ability; Index.

'These are all superb papers. In addition to Peter van Inwagen's classic and indispensable contributions to the free will debate, Thinking about Free Will includes illuminating discussion of whether there is anything we all mean by 'free will', how we should think about the problem of free will, and whether free will remains a mystery. It is frank and fascinating.' Michael Almeida, University of Texas, San Antonio