Puzzles for the Will

Patrick Colgan is the former executive director of the Canadian Museum
of Nature.

Free will is one of the most-studied yet recondite topics in the
philosophy of mind; hence, distinguishing a genuine contribution from
reworkings of earlier arguments is crucial. Sobel, an emeritus professor
of philosophy at the University of Toronto, has assembled his critical
views into four chapters, two dealing with logical fatalisms and two
with causal.

In the first pair, he examines “Che sara sara” and
“life-saving” arguments with the aid of alethic and deontic
necessities pertaining to truth and morals respectively. He concludes
that premises are often ambiguous and that one cannot go from logical to
material necessity. Chapter 2 asks whether “predicted choice” is a
contradiction and examines conflicts in theories of rational choice.
Under causal fatalisms, Sobel contrasts prediction versus determination
and possible approaches involving states, processes, and
block-universes. He demonstrates that at least one of six determinisms
distinguished is compatible with free will and appropriately raises the
related issue of miracles. The last chapter is a critique of a recent
book on free will by John Martin Fischer. Throughout, Sobel makes
extensive use of syllogistic analyses and logical formalisms to
substantiate his conclusions.

Sobel admits to being a libertarian, which certainly slants his summary
views on determinism and fatalism. The book is entirely philosophical,
paying no attention to the vast amount of related scientific data from
such areas as neurology. It is also an advanced book requiring a strong
background in the philosophy of mind and symbolic logic. For instance,
the development of the lemma cited on p. 197 is “left to the
interested reader.” For the others whose eyes have not already glazed
over, the question persists as to how much the issue of free will has
been advanced by this volume.