A review by xanderman001
Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will by James Ryerson, David Foster Wallace, Steven M. Cahn, Jay L. Garfield, Maureen Eckert

3.0

I might, under the laws of Goodreads, be cheating with this placement on my read shelf. There are 40 odd pages I've left unread here (from Wallace's modality essay and Taylor's Aristotle essay respectively). I count this, however, under the acknowledgment that I extracted all that my current self could extract from this extremely technical book. I would both recommend and not recommend this book to fans of Wallace's work. Recommend it for the introduction by James Ryerson that contrasts the writing and material of this essay to what would become the essential postmodern literature of 'Broom of the System'. Additionally, this book does a great job of formulating Wallace's references in the first part of the volume as a framework for the criticism of Taylor's semantic manipulation that is used to take logical and physical modalities to suggest a misleading correlation between the antecedent and consequent of Fatalism. Besides this groundwork in Wallace's postmodern sensibilities, the book is too reliant (and justifiably so) on its academic allusions to be anything besides the slight curiosity to Wallace-heads. I can see myself in the future picking this back up when I have the credentials to bask in such logical beauty. Until then, however, I must give this a light pat on the back and watch it ride into the sunset like some kind of allegorical horse.