Juarrero's lively text skillfully applies the kinds of causal analyses required in non-equilibrium, complex systems theory to the problems of action theory.
Stanley N. Salthe, Biological Sciences, Binghamton University
This fascinating book makes an important contribution to a central topic in the philosophy of mind. It is also a fine introduction to the 'new' philosophy of science, which has set aside outworn models from the Cartesian and Newtonian domination and taken its place in the front line of scientific debate, along with a biological vision of information and complex systems.
Stephen Toulmin, Henry R. Luce Professor, University of Southern California
As Juarrero's excellent and comprehensive review of the literature shows, conceptual analyses of what constitutes the difference between a wink and a blink, a free action, and a mere movement, continue to be hampered by too disembodied a conception of freedom and too mechanistic a conception of nature. Juarrero's pioneering use of complex systems dynamics and information theory breaks through this barrier, showing that conceptual analysis need not be a place where old scientific theories go to die when they cannot solve the problems that mean most to us. An extraordinary enlightening and liberating performance.
David Depew, Department of Communication Studies, University of Iowa
A vast amount of ink has been spilled trying to reconcile our control over own actions—our free will—with the physical, causal nature of brain processes. Alicia Juarrero has taken us much closer to a solution to this puzzle, reconstructing the self and its agency as emergent constraints on the dynamic of the complex physical system that is our brain. She has brought one of the oldest questions in philosophy into contact with some of the most exciting recent work in the sciences of the mind. Every philosopher interested in the nature of human agency should read this book.
Paul E. Griffiths, Director, Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, Faculty of Science, University of Sydney, Australia
