Why would Mother Nature bother? 
Jerry Fodor
- Freedom Evolves by Daniel C. Dennett
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.
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Jerry Fodor is collaborating with Massimo Piattelli-Palamarini on a book about evolution without adaptation.
Other articles by this contributor:
Neither Egypt, nor Italy, nor Broadway, nor Theatre · Jerry Fodor sees the Elton John and Tim Rice reworking of Aida
Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings · The Case against Natural Selection
Look! · Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson
Let your brain alone · why the brain?
Water’s water everywhere · Kripke
The Trouble with Psychological Darwinism · Pinker and Plotkin
Headaches have themselves · Panpsychism
Who ate the salted peanuts? · Michael Frayn
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