Thad Botham Books

The exploration of free will is at the heart of this book, challenging the prevailing scientific perspectives that often dismiss the concept. It emphasizes the idea of agent-causation as a crucial yet overlooked aspect of free will, arguing that individuals act as self-determined originators of their choices. By rigorously addressing common objections and engaging with contemporary scholarship, the book aims to reshape the discourse on free will, offering fresh insights that could significantly influence future academic discussions.

Sometimes you make a choice. Whether or not you made it was up to you. The choice was free. But how can this be? A scientific view of the world may leave no room for free choice. Free will literature continually explodes. Yet experts still focus on control or on a power to do otherwise. Sadly, they neglect another intuitive feature of free being an underived source or ultimate originator. When acting freely, one is a self-determined, self-directed, sole author of change. Surprisingly, though the literature is replete with this pre-theoretic feature of free will, virtually no one makes rigorous use of it when constructing arguments. Equipped with fresh research, this book contends that agent-causation-currently an unpopular theory-deserves serious reconsideration. Only agent-causation accounts for ultimate ori-gina-tion, and popular objections fail under rigorous scrutiny. This book is tightly argued. It challenges and deepens recent advances in free will scholarship made by Peter van Inwagen, Robert Kane, Carl Ginet, Randy Clarke, Stewart Goetz, Tim O'Connor, and others. It will change the way scholars argue about free will.