Freedom Within Reason - Softcover

For over a decade, Susan Wolf has been developing an unusual and challenging view about human freedom and responsibility in a series of widely read articles. We are now fortunate to have a more complete presentation of it, in Freedom within Reason. (Times Literary Supplement)

clearly written ... structured in a way which should make it readily accessible to undergraduates (Philosophical Quarterly)

In this book, Susan Wolf charts a course between incompatibilism, or the notion that freedom and responsibility require casual and metaphysical independence from the impersonal forces of nature, and compatibilism, or the notion that people are free and responsible as long as their actions are governed by their desires. Wolf argues that some of the forces which are beyond our control are friends to freedom rather than enemies of it, enabling us to see the world for what it is. The freedom we want is not independence from the world, but independence from the forces that prevent us from choosing how to live in the light of a sufficient appreciation of the world.