Why would Mother Nature bother? 

Jerry Fodor

Been feeling bad about being a thing? Been feeling that the laws of nature are pushing you around? Here’s a book-length dose of Daniel Dennett’s Cold Comfort Cure. According to Dennett, ‘naturalism is no enemy of free will; it provides a positive account of free will.’ Sound too good to be true? Well, so it is. Proposals for ‘compatibilist’ resolutions of the problem of determinism aren’t new to philosophy, of course. But they always turn out to be a sort of Chinese lunch: there’s the lurking sense that what you got isn’t quite what you ordered, and half an hour later you’re hungry again.

Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.