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Christopher Yeomans. Freedom and Reflection: Hegel and the Logic of Agency. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xiii + 275. Cloth, $74.00.
In this ambitious study, Christopher Yeomans argues that Hegel's Science of Logic contains the resources for resolving traditional problems with free will that have long divided libertarians, determinists, and compatibilists. According to Yeomans, Hegel belongs to none of these camps; instead, he maintains both the libertarian's belief that freedom entails "an open future with alternate possibilities," which the compatibilist denies, and the determinist's claim that our actions are necessary events in the world (8). How can Hegel maintain this without incoherence? On Yeoman's account, by redefining determinism so that "rather than being incompatible with free will it serves as an articulation of its basic structure" (8).
Yeomans proposes understanding Hegel's redefinition of determinism in terms of his "response to three different versions of the principle of sufficient reason [PSR] that have historically seemed to make free will problematic" (4). These three versions are (1) "that everything has an explanation or ground," (2) "that sufficient reasons make what they explain necessary," and (3) "that every phenomenon [has] a cause" (4-5). These versions pose a threat to the idea of free will because they suggest, respectively, that one's "action is external to, necessitated by, and is fixed and...