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Freedom Evolves

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About this listen

Can there be freedom and free will in a deterministic world? Renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett emphatically answers "yes!" Using an array of provocative formulations, Dennett sets out to show how we alone among the animals have evolved minds that give us free will and morality. Weaving a richly detailed narrative, Dennett explains in a series of strikingly original arguments - drawing upon evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, economics, and philosophy - that far from being an enemy of traditional explorations of freedom, morality, and meaning, the evolutionary perspective can be an indispensable ally. In Freedom Evolves, Dennett seeks to place ethics on the foundation it deserves: a realistic, naturalistic, potentially unified vision of our place in nature.

©2003 Daniel C. Dennett (P)2013 Audible, Inc. Biological Sciences Evolution Evolution & Genetics History & Philosophy Philosophy Physics Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Science Social Sciences Morality
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This book was amazing, beautifully written by Daniel C. Dennett, his explanations about darwinism was the best I have ever heard!!! Great narration by Robert Blumenfeld :)

Brilliant from start to finish

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I may get a print edition to study the hardest parts without having to fight the urge to ignore the narrator. I learned a lot and found it solidifying ideas in his other books as well as introducing loads of new concepts too.

I must get more cleverer

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There are some great and insightful arguments for compatibilism in this book. A few, I plan to deploy in my own way. But I wish someone would just come out and say explicitly, that there is simply no such thing as freedom OR determinism, and therefore, there is nothing to make "compatibile". Dennett gets very close to this, a few times, but never quite gets there. We simply don't quite understand what we're talking about, with regard to human action and intention, and these categories of "free will" and "determinism" are like the difference between Ptolemy and Kepler. As Copernicus showed, they were BOTH wrong.

Brilliant, but deflationary...

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This book confuses as much as it elucidates, but the arguments it seeks to expound work better with different examples and different framings. Dennett's recent writing on the same topic is much clearer, in my view.

Great argument, imperfectly argued

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