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

The Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Pale King and Infinite Jest weighs in on a philosophical controversy in this fascinating early work.

In 1962, the philosopher Richard Taylor used six commonly accepted presuppositions to imply that human beings have no control over the future. David Foster Wallace not only took issue with Taylor's method, which, according to him, scrambled the relations of logic, language, and the physical world, but also detected a semantic trick at the heart ...