Saul Smilansky received his D.Phil. from Oxford University and is a Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa, Israel. He works primarily on normative and applied ethics and on the metaphysics of free will and its ethical implications.

He is a chief representative of illusionism, which is a theory close to hard determinism, according to which there is no libertarian free will, yet an illusion of such free will is important for maintaining our moral practices and legal institutions. Prof. Smilansky is the author of Free Will and Illusion (Oxford University Press 2000), 10 Moral Paradoxes (Blackwell 2007), and over seventy papers in philosophical journals.