ETD

• Agency
• Dennett
• Filosofia della Mente
• Free Will
• Libero Arbitrio

The free will debate is among the most fertile in the history of philosophy, with roots extending back to IV century BCE Greece and remaining as vibrant as ever today. Among the contemporary philosophers who dedicated the most effort into shaping a model of free will grounded in a naturalistic framework and coherent with empiric evidence offered in the last fifty years by neurosciences, Daniel Dennett may very well be the most relevant. The aim of the present study is to engage critically with Dennett’s position, outlining its strengths and weaknesses. As part of the concluding consideration, it is emphasized that there is no intention to criticize Dennett’s proposal concerning free will as elbow room, that is, the room for maneuver necessary to be free in a certain sense. The main difficulty faced by Dennett’s proposal is not that it appears implausible, but rather that it fails to deliver a robust notion of freedom capable of fulfilling the functions that explain why it is so jealously guarded. The elbow room identified by Dennett is certainly a form of freedom that we possess, but it is not the one that most of us desire.