THE DETERMINISTS

Awards & Accolades Our Verdict GET IT HARRIS, SAPOLSKY, HOSSENFELDER AND THE FREE WILL DEBATE by Lawrence David Rose ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 2026 A clearly written and much-needed corrective to the assured claims of determinists. Awards & Accolades Our Verdict GET IT Rose surveys contemporary takes on the concept of free will in this nonfiction work. The author focuses on a trio of figures he describes as standing at the forefront of “determinist advocacy” who argue that free will is an illusion: Sam Harris, who wrote the 2012 book Free Will, Robert Sapolsky, whose 2023 book was titled Determined, and Sabine Hossenfelder, who runs a popular podcast that discusses the subject. Rose observes that because everybody goes about their lives making decisions every day “using some combination of instinct, reason, and desire,” the idea that everything we do is predetermined “runs against the grain of ordinary experience.” The authors covered here and other adherents to their perspective describe a universe that’s entirely determined, with every nuance of human behavior being the end product of impersonal forces—consciousness, in this formulation, is the byproduct of neural precondi...