Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will Review

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(More customer reviews)This book centers around David Foster Wallace's undergraduate honors thesis in philosophy. It begins with a very well-written and interesting introduction to the philosophical argument DFW takes to task in his thesis, an argument by Taylor that takes a set of commonly accepted philosophical presuppositions and entails fatalism. The book then presents Taylor's article, originally published in the early 1960s, and a flurry of (sometimes heated) responses by other philosophers. All of this serves as the background for Wallace's work, which extends (seemingly substantially) upon those other responses.
I'm not a philosopher by either trade or background, and so I won't claim to have followed every nuance of all of the arguments, and as a reader, I found the back-and-forth regarding Taylor's original argument less interesting than either the introduction or DFW's contribution. However, the thesis itself is lucid (and I think easier to follow than several of the other arguments, even if it is not particularly light reading), and in a word, satisfying. It seems to me that David Foster Wallace was an exceptionally gifted person, and so I am glad that the editors and contributors put forth the effort to make it available. It was also enjoyable to detect elements of his literary style even at this early stage of his writing.
Based on this book alone, I'm not convinced that David Foster Wallace found the question of free will (as the subtitle might suggest) all that vexing or in need of defense - it seems as likely that he was concerned about the imprecise use of language and the confusion it may lead to - that doesn't detract from the book in any way. Very enjoyable for fans of DFW or, say, modal semantics.

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