Flickers of Freedom

At Last

An eminently reasonable popular article on free will and neuroscience. Enjoy.

3:AM Interview with Mele

Yet another interesting and illuminating interview by 3:AM's Richard Marshall.  This time, Al Meletalks about free will, self-deception, neuroscience, experimental philosophy and a number of other themes.  Check it out!

Crowd-sourcing my SPA Remarks

At the annual International Free Will Conference (you know, the Pacific APA), the Society for the Philosophy of Agency is having its inaugural meeting. There’s going to be a panel discussion on the State of the Field, and I’m tasked with talking about free will. Among the things I’m supposed to be ready to talk about are the current central issues in debates about free will, interesting developments, and emerging topics over the next 5+ years.

For the talk, I thought about consulting my intuitions on the matters. However, I’ve been told that my intuitions are generally defective. So, I thought I should do some Serious Experimental work and just ask you, dear blog reader, what you think about these matters. I can’t promise that I will use your remarks in my talk, but I can’t promise that I won’t. I can promise that I won't run a regression analysis on the frequency of various remarks.

So I bleg of you: what do you think is Big Time in free will, what’s new and exciting to you, and what do you think will be Big Time in 5+ years? 

Why a Pseudonym?

Does anyone know why Dickinson S. Miller published his famous free-will paper under the name R. E. Hobart?

The Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists one other paper published under the pseudonym and several published by Miller under his own name.

Problems of the Self at CEU

Central European University’s summer school (http://summer.ceu.hu/self-2012) invites applications from graduate students, junior faculty and researchers from all over the world. 

The course aims to present the state of the art in research on the self from philosophy, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, sociology, and cognitive anthropology. Themes revolve around the nature of the self, as revealed through self-consciousness, body perception, action and joint action, and its embedding in society and culture. Historical and developmental perspectives provide other angles on the self. The course presents a unique opportunity for interdisciplinary discussion on the self from multiple perspectives. It is directed at advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty working in philosophy, psychology, cognitive neuroscience and cognate disciplines.

Course Directors:
Natalie Sebanz, Cognitive Science Department, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary/Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Raboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands; Hong Yu Wong, Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, Philosophy of Neuroscience Group, University of Tubingen, Germany

Faculty:
Peter Callero, Department of Sociology, Western Oregon University, Monmouth, USA; Guenther Knoblich, Department of Cognitive Science, CEU, Budapest, Hungary; Beatrice Longuenesse, Department of Philosophy, New York University, USA; Christopher A. B. Peacocke, Department of Philosophy, Columbia University, New York, USA; Phillipe Rochat, Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, USA; Paul Snowdon, Department of Philosophy, University College London, UK; Manos Tsakiris, Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK; 

Guest Speakers:
Maurice Bloch, Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics, UK; Gyorgy Gergely, Department of Cognitive Science/Cognitive Development Centre, CEU, Budapest, Hungary

The application deadline is February 15, 2012 (late applications will be reviewed until all course places have been filled).

Financial aid is available.

Metaphysical Mayhem!

Metaphysical Mayhem is back! Rutgers University will be hosting a 5-day summer school for graduate students May 14-18, 2012. John Hawthorne, Katherine Hawley,  Ted Sider, Jonathan Schaffer, and Dean Zimmerman will lead the seminars on a variety of topics in metaphysics, including: natural properties, composition as identity, grounding, metaphysical explanation, and stuff like that...

For more information, see:

http://fas-philosophy.rutgers.edu/mbenton/mayhem.html