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What Philosophers Think edited by Julian Baggini and Jeremy Stangroom, Continuum, £45/$75, ISBN 0826467547 Reviewed by Mike Holderness

IF YOU had free will, in the folk-wisdom sense of the word, then the decisions you made would take place without any kind of causality, so they would occupy a corner of the universe in which there was no science. Conversely, the kind of “free will” that seems to be consistent with a universally causal universe consists of no more than the statement that you do not (I sincerely hope) have a gun to your head, are not in prison and not…

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