Freedom Evolves

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.

Table of Contents:
freedom evolvesPreface Chapter 1: Natural Freedom Learning What We Are I Am Who I Am The Air We Breathe Dumbo's Magic Feather and the Peril of Paulina Chapter 2: A Tool For Thinking About Determinism Some Useful Oversimplifications From Physics to Design in Conway's Life World Can We Get The Deus ex Machina? From Slow-motion Avoidance to Star Wars The Birth of Evitability Chapter 3: Thinking About Determinism Possible Worlds Causation Austin's Putt A Computer Chess Marathon Events without Causes in a Deterministic Universe Will the Future Be Like the Past? Chapter 4: A Hearing For Libertarianism The Appeal of Libertarianism Where Should We Put the Much-needed Gap? Kane's Model of Indeterministic Decision-making "If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything" Beware of Prime Mammals How Can It Be "Up to Me"? Chapter 5: Where Does All The Design Come From? Early Days The Prisoner's Dilemma E Pluribus Unum? Digression: The Threat of Genetic Determinism Degrees of Freedom and the Search for Truth Chapter 6: The Evolution Of Open Minds How Cultural Symbionts Turn Primates into Persons The Diversity of Darwinian Explanations Nice Tools, but You Still Have to Use Them Chapter 7: The Evolution Of Moral Agency Benselfishness Being Good in Order to Seem Good Learning to Deal with Yourself Our Costly Merit Badges Chapter 8: Are You Out Of The Loop? Drawing the Wrong Moral Whenever the Spirit Moves You A Mind-writer's View A Self of One's Own Chapter 9: Bootstrapping Ourselves Free How We Captured Reasons and Made Them Our Own Psychic Engineering and the Arms Race of Rationality With a Little Help from My Friends Autonomy, Brainwashing, and Education Chapter 10: The Future Of Human Freedom Holding the Line against Creeping Exculpation "Thanks, I Needed That" Are We Freer Than We Want to Be? Human Freedom Is Fragile Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Daniel C. Dennett, the author of Freedom Evolves (Viking) and Darwin's Dangerous Idea, is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He lives with his wife in North Andover, Massachusetts, and has a daughter, a son, and a grandson. He was born in Boston in 1942, the son of a historian by the same name, and received his BA in philosophy from Harvard in 1963. He then went to Oxford to work with Gilbert Ryle, under whose supervision he completed his D.Phil. in philosophy in 1965. He taught at U.C. Irvine from 1965 to 1971, when he moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since, aside from periods visiting at Harvard, Pittsburgh, Oxford, and the Ecole Normal Superieure in Paris. His first book, Content and Consciousness, published in 1969, followed by Brainstorms (1978), Elbow Room (1984), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), and Kinds of Minds (1996). He coedited The Mind's I with Douglas Hofstadter in 1981. He is the author of more than a hundred scholarly articles on various aspects on the mind, published in journals ranging from Artificial Intelligence and Behavioral and Brain Sciences to Poetics Today and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. His most recent book is Brainchildren: A Collection of Essays 1984–1996 (MIT Press and Penguin, 1998).He gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1983, the Gavin David Young Lectures at Adelaide, Australia, in 1985, and the Tanner Lecture at Michigan in 1986, among many others. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987.

Review :
“Dennett has taken on really big issues, made them clear, dealt with them seriously and given us much on which to reflect. . . . Crisp and critically insightful.” —The Washington Post Book World“One of the most original thinkers of our time.” —Science "Dennett stands as the sharpest, cleverest, most stylish prober of how issues of human consciousness interconnect today with evolutionary theory." —The Philadelphia Inquirer "A serious book with a brilliant message." —Matt Ridley, The Sunday Telegraph