> Kant's joke - Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the common man, that the common man was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in support of the popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people.

The idea of free will is a "popular prejudice" that has been supported almost entirely by this type of philosopher. There is a quick way to identify them: the appeal to intuition as the supreme arbiter of truth. Most of western civilization believed in free will (in part for reasons of theology), therefore the belief in free will was inculcated in the populace, therefore philosophers found their intuition ultimately verified the existence of free will and used their incredible intellects to rationalize what that confused idea even was and how it worked in the face of obvious paradoxes.

Many philosophers, for thousands of years, did not accept these arguments. I quote Nietzsche because he is eminently quotable:

> Of these "inward facts" that seem to demonstrate causality, the primary and most persuasive one is that of the will as cause. The idea of consciousness ("spirit") or, later, that of the ego [I] (the "subject") as a cause are only afterbirths: first the causality of the will was firmly accepted as proved, as a fact, and these other concepts followed from it. But we have reservations about these concepts. Today we no longer believe any of this is true.

Nietzsche was in some ways more of a psychologist than a philosopher and is worth reading on those grounds alone. In fact, according to Nietzsche, philosophy is mostly interesting as a reflection of the philosopher's health and therefore his psychology.