Un-Willing: An Inquiry into the Rise of Will’s Power & an Attempt to Undo It

Since ancient times, philosophers have written about the will . But the will is more than a philosophic and scholarly topic. In our everyday speech, what do we mean when we speak of the will ? Will-words turn up everywhere in the English language. We make wills. We exert our willpower. We are wilful at times but merely willing at others. Above all, will is there a hundred times a day, when we use the auxiliary verb will to express our intentions or expectations for the future, or simply to indicate the future tense. Yet it takes only a moment’s reflection to see that there’s a tremendous range of meaning here, and so something to think about. Moreover, all of us have wondered now and then, probably both as children and as adults, whether we are really free, and whether being free means being able to do what we want or being free of wants and desires or something else entirely. That is, we have all wrestled with the issue of free will in our informal, non-scholarly ways. Finally, we have probably all asked ourselves whether people who talk about will and willpower are all talking about the same thing or even talking sense. These are among the issues that Eva Brann puts at the centre of Un-Willing. She takes the whole range of questions about the will that are implicit in our everyday lives and everyday thinking, articulates them, shows us how they have been dealt with within the philosophic tradition and contemporary scientific thought – and then wrestles with them herself.