Book Club: Scientific Metaphysics, 5, Causation, free will, and naturalism

Philosophy as a Way of Life
9 min readNov 19, 2021
[image: the difference between causation and correlation, Wikimedia]

The standard story about free will is that if one is a naturalist (i.e., no gods and such stuff) and takes seriously the notion of cause and effect, then free will is an illusion. But does the standard story stand up to a bit of critical scrutiny? Let’s find out by discussing the last chapter of Scientific Metaphysics, a volume edited by Don Ross, James Ladyman…

Philosophy as a Way of Life

by Massimo Pigliucci. Practical philosophy, science, pseudoscience & good reasoning. Complete index of articles at https://massimopigliucci.org/essays/