This chapter argues that rejecting belief in free will – far from being nihilistic or socially corrosive – can be morally transformative and psychologically liberating. While many fear that disbelief in free will would undermine personal responsibility, justice, and meaning, the author argues for a position he calls optimistic skepticism, which combines free will skepticism with a hopeful vision of human flourishing. This chapter outlines the case for skepticism about the kind of free will needed for basic desert moral responsibility – the idea that individuals fundamentally deserve blame or praise for their actions. Drawing on philosophy, psychology, and empirical evidence, the chapter critiques both libertarian and compatibilist accounts of free will and defends a position known as hard incompatibilism, which holds that we lack the control in action required for basic desert. The chapter also introduces the moral and practical implications of this view, arguing that abandoning the belief in free will enables more humane approaches to criminal justice, social inequality, and interpersonal relationships.

To the surprise of both academic and pundits, Javier Milei was elected president of Argentina at the end of 2023. However, there is very limited research about him and his ideas. Chapter 2 addresses this gap and demonstrates that Milei is a case of a far-right leader with populist radical components. The main elements of his discourse are: (a) the defense of a libertarian program of radical criticism of state intervention and strongly critical of the left’s distributive programs; (b) an anti-establishment performance of criticism of "la casta," as opposed to the "argentinos de bien," which is expressed both in the violence of his discourse and in corporal and aesthetic elements associated with anger against the political establishment; (c) a relatively new and opportunistic approach toward both morally conservative and "iron fist" positions regarding crime. Some elements typical of the European populist radical right are absent in Milei, such as anti-immigration positions. Others, such as climate skeptic positions, take a very secondary place in his appeal. In sum, Milei’s case fits the usual definition of far right but does not fully fit the definitions of extreme right or of the populist radical right.

This chapter examines the libertarian and reactionary elements in William Burroughs’ life and work, placing them in dialogue with the twenty-first-century alt-right’s attempts to reclaim him as a prophetic figure. Florian Zappe interrogates the paradox of Burroughs as both icon of the countercultural avant-garde and a card-carrying NRA member who espoused conspiratorial, anti-statist, and sometimes openly bigoted views. The chapter traces how alt-right figures – from internet provocateurs to fringe ideologues – have co-opted Burroughs’ anti-establishment ethos and aesthetic of transgression, often through decontextualized misreadings that ignore his literary complexity and formal irony. Zappe explores Burroughs’ ambivalence toward political systems, his rejection of ideological coherence, and his commitment to aesthetic resistance rather than activism. Ultimately, the chapter argues that while Burroughs’ work harbors troubling reactionary tropes, it defies fascist instrumentalization by resisting ideological fixity and embracing an anarchic pluralism that places him far outside the alt-right’s monolithic vision of power.

The chapter investigates the conflict between emerging “schools” of environmental thought in the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on Buckminster Fuller’s techno-optimist, libertarian environmentalism and its influence on today’s floating city concepts, like the UN-backed project in Busan. It addresses the questions of why and how Buckminster Fuller’s bright green environmentalism—blending ecological design with market-driven innovation—clashed with the technocritical, governmental reform-oriented dark green environmentalism of US officials and public intellectuals. Analyzing three cases, the chapter argues that these conflicts with dark green environmentalists demonstrated a lack of social acceptance for floating urban structures in US society due to Fuller’s libertarian views, aesthetic issues, pollution concerns, and limited governmental control over oceanic space. The chapter also highlights the lasting impact of Fuller’s ideas through the Whole Earth network and countercultural movements. The chapter contends that governmental and intergovernmental support for floating settlement ideas has grown since the 2010s, shaped by reemerging bright green environmentalist ideas.

The final chapter opens with a hypothetical debate between cosmopolitan and particularist positions, which is then mapped onto contemporary political philosophy. It concludes with Joseph Raz’s pluralist and perfectionist liberal requirement that states should support culture.

philosophy of neuroscience, experimental philosophy, philosophy of action, free will, libertarianism, agent-causation, wild coincidence objection, statistical laws, probabilistic models, stochastic models, plasticity

It has been argued that our scientific discoveries support at least one of two distinct forms of causal reduction thereby making the notion that we irreducible agents obsolete. One is the reduction of the manifestation of causal dispositions to stimulated responses. The other is the reduction of kinds of causes of physical change to those studied in the hard sciences. In this chapter, I argue that neither have any scientific support. Rather, whether either form of reduction is viable won’t ultimately be resolved by scientific advancement but by analytic progress. Furthermore, I argue that attempts at the first are misguided as attempts at reducing what is a process (i.e., the manifestation of a causal disposition) to what can be a result of various processes (i.e., a stimulated response); while attempts at the second ultimately involve not fully taking into account how the specificity of any domain of science limits the generalizability of what can be discovered through it.

Here, I provide a summary of the notion of our agency for which I argue throughout this book, and how it resolves several longstanding problems within the philosophical literature on free will; namely – the “basic argument” and the “luck problem.”

The best models for certain neural matters underlying the expression of our agency are stochastic or probabilistic. While this fact has been thought to be consistent with the notion that we are irreducible agents who settle matters that aren’t already settled, this consistency has come under dispute. It has been argued that, given probabilistic models apply to the underlying neural matters, for the way we express the ability to settle matters that aren’t already settled to perfectly align with what should be expected would, over the long run, amount to a wild coincidence. I argue that this objection is an empirical objection that goes against empirical findings. Thus, it isn’t credible. Moreover, what we continue to observe through neuroscience is evocative of the idea that we are irreducible agents who do this sort of settling in the midst of disposing and inclining factors.

Consistent with and extending from observations made in the previous chapters, I show that there is a fundamental problem with attempts at reducing ourselves, as settlers of matters that aren’t already settled, to mental states and/or events and offer an explanation as to why.

This is the first of three chapters devoted to questions about human free will from a Jewish perspective. I identify three challenges to belief in free will: divine foreknowledge; divine control of history; and scientific determinism. The Bible ignores problems about free will that philosophers obsess over. This serves as a prelude to chapter 5, which examines a biblical episode that does engage one problem that analytic philosophers have addressed.

Chapter 6 focuses on Arnauld’s account of human freedom in its historical context. Arnauld’s early Jansenist view is compatibilist, but his view evolves and there is much debate about whether his later view remains compatibilist. I begin the chapter by considering several concepts relevant to Arnauld’s account and three possible positions: compatibilism, incompatibilitist-libertarianism, and compatibilist-libertarianism. I then discuss some important context, including the views of freedom and grace of Molina, Bañez, and Jansen. I proceed to look at some of Arnauld’s letters where he discusses his later view of human freedom and highlight three key themes in these letters as well as discussing some ambiguities in his use of various concepts and examples. I continue to consider several of his later texts, most notably De Libertate, and argue his later view is a version of incompatibilist-libertarianism. I close the chapter by arguing that the key cases and passages that have been the focus of much scholarship on Arnauld’s view are not intended to illuminate human freedom, but are instead meant to defend efficacious grace, and that Arnauld’s ambiguity in their presentation is intentional.

The leading early twentieth-century US proponents of a transformation in the social organization of money were – albeit far from unproblematically – collectivist and communitarian in ideological orientation, whereas those that succeeded them tended toward libertarian, individualistic, and free-market positions. This chapter offers the first examination of American literature’s connections to this latter wave of alternative currency campaigns, ranging from 1970s calls for privatized monies to contemporary cryptocurrency. It first introduces the foundational articulation of the right-libertarian approach to monetary reform, by the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, and connects these ideas to a classic of US avant-garde fiction as well as a landmark of the American libertarian literary canon. It then explores how two of the most renowned economically-themed American novels of recent decades – Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles (2016) and Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (1999) – put a libertarian understanding of monetary innovation into dialogue with complex questions of trust, value, technology, nation, and identity. It concludes by reading an important recent addition to the tradition of American weird fiction – Michael Cisco’s Animal Money (2015) – as suggesting alternatives both to the too-narrow conceptions of the collective and to the privileging of the individual that have characterized visions of monetary transformation past and present.

The conclusion reviews Schopenhauer’s conception of politics as the management of human strife. For Schopenhauer, politics was both indispensable and insufficient: rational political coordination can prevent society from descending into a chaos of mutual aggression, but because rationality itself is limited and metaphysically subordinate, it cannot redeem a fundamentally broken world. Schopenhauer’s attitudes – a sincere sensitivity to human and animal suffering, an uncompromising commitment to frank philosophizing, but also a fearful antidemocratic and anti-emancipatory view of society – place him outside the major ideologies of the modern age, such as liberalism, libertarianism, progressivism, and conservatism.

The modern challenges to social and political stability. The presentation of the book’s modest proposal.

Boethius’ initial question in the Consolation of Philosophy is why God, who orders the natural universe beautifully, would allow human affairs to proceed in a chaotic fashion, even permitting the wicked to trample on the virtuous and go unpunished. Lady Philosophy responds that God governs everything well. What seem to limited human beings to be misfortunes can all be turned to good. This introduces the importance of human free will and a perennial question for Christian philosophers: If God foreknows future choices, can they be free? Human foreknowledge is a sign that the foreknown event does not happen voluntarily. God, being eternal, sees all time as present, and so divine foreknowledge does not impose or indicate any necessity that would conflict with free will. Boethius concludes by expressing theist compatibilism: Even free choices fall under the absolute sovereignty of God.