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Letters
Letters to the Editor
Feather-free • Altruism? • Philosophy When? • Descartes’ Monads • A Cry for Help
The letters page of Philosophy Now is a space where readers can express their opinions about anything philosophical. It is nice to see that people are doing just that. Keep those letters rolling in, folks!
Feather-free
Dear Sir,
In his brief critique of Antony Flew’s and mine own articles on free will, Roger Squires questions my accusation of verbal trickery applied to Daniel Dennett: “When has the making of a distinction, which (if correct) would invalidate an influential argument that overlooks it, been dismissible as a trick?”
Most philosophers writing on the subject do so in an attempt to show that we have free will; the anti-free will group is relatively small. However, as the cognitive sciences have developed a new factor has been added to the discussion, and that is whether we have a variety of free will worth wanting, to hark back to the title of Dennett’s book. Suppose I defined “having free will” to mean “the property of being a featherless biped with teeth”; this is a bit silly (and a questionable etymology) but we would certainly have free will under such a definition.
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