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The first of two goals of this book is to provide a critical survey of the major debates about free will and determinism of the past quarter century, a period during which there have been many new developments in the study of this ancient philosophical problem. The book seeks to acquaint readers with current debates and new developments on free will, showing their relevance to broad contemporary concerns in ethics, politics, science, religion, and humanities. The second goal of the book is to defend a traditional view of free will and moral responsibility, according to which both are incompatible with determinism. In response to claims that such a traditional view of free will (often nowadays called an “incompatibilist” or “libertarian” view) has no place in the modern scientific picture of the world, the book argues that a nondeterminist conception of free will can be defended without the usual appeals to obscure or mysterious forms of agency and can be reconciled with recent developments in the sciences – physical, biological, neurological, cognitive, and behavioral. The book also discusses the relation of free will to other important topics, such as morality, dignity, rationality, creativity, autonomy, desert, causation, consciousness, alternative possibilities, explanations of action, reasons for action, practical reason, weakness of will, incommensurability of values, and others.

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Received (to be inserted by publisher); Revised (to be inserted by publisher); Accepted (to be inserted by publisher); NASA's suborbital program provides an opportunity to conduct unique science experiments above Earth's atmosphere and is a pipeline for the technology and personnel essential to future space astrophysics, heliophysics, and atmospheric science missions. In this paper, we describe three astronomy payloads developed (or in development) by the Ultraviolet Rocket Group at the University of Colorado. These far-ultraviolet (100 -160 nm) spectrographic instruments are used to study a range of scientific topics, from gas in the interstellar medium (accessing diagnostics of material spanning five orders of magnitude in temperature in a single observation) to the energetic radiation environment of nearby exoplanetary systems. The three instruments, SLICE (Suborbital Local Interstellar Cloud Experiment), CHESS (Colorado High-resolution Echelle Stellar Spectrograph), and SISTINE (Suborbital Imaging Spectrograph for Transition region Irradiance from Nearby Exoplanet host stars) form a progression of instrument designs and component-level technology maturation. SLICE is a pathfinder instrument for the development of new data handling, storage, and telemetry techniques. CHESS and SISTINE are testbeds for technology and instrument design enabling high-resolution (R > 10 5 ) point source spectroscopy and high throughput imaging spectroscopy, respectively, in support of future Explorer, Probe, and Flagship-class missions. The CHESS and SISTINE payloads support the development and flight testing of large-format photon-counting detectors and advanced optical coatings: NASA's top two technology priorities for enabling a future flagship observatory (e.g., the LUVOIR Surveyor concept) that offers factors of ~50 -100 gain in ultraviolet spectroscopy capability over the Hubble Space Telescope. We present the design, component level laboratory characterization, and flight results for these instruments.