Elbow Room (Dennett book)
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| Author | Daniel C. Dennett |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Philosophy |
| Publisher | The MIT Press |
Publication date | 1984, 2015 (new edition) |
| Publication place | Cambridge, Massachusetts |
| Pages | 227 (new edition) |
Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting is a 1984 book by the philosopher Daniel Dennett in which the author argues for a compatibilist conception of free will. Based on the John Locke Lectures that Dennett presented in 1983,[1][2][3][4] it is his third book.
Dennett's professed goal is to reclaim a common-sense conception of free will without appeal to any "dubious" metaphysics. He wants to show our common-sense conception of free will is generally compatible with a view of ourselves as purely physical, biological organisms, and that the fact that this is our nature should not lead us to draw radical conclusions about our status as agents. In his words, “the common wisdom about our place in the universe is roughly right. We do have free will. We can have free will and science too.”[5]