Flickers of Freedom

After the Free Will Renaissance

Some folks who weren't going to be attending the Pacific APA asked me to post my SPA Meeting remarks on the future of the free will debate (thanks Andrei and Luca for organizing that session!). For those interested, here were the core of those remarks: 

1. The past 40 years of work on free will work has been dominated by philosophers working out the consequences of a problematic given to us by the Great Trinity
2. We’re approaching Event Horizon for that work, i.e., the point where that work will have significantly less visible influence on subsequent generations. 
3. What comes next is hard to see, and indeed, it is entertaining but Ultimately Fruitless to speculate about what comes next.  
4. However, since reality is no constraint on The Provocative, I’ve made some prognostications that are at least as plausible as any random selection of theses 

For the details, read on.

Grad Student Conference on Free Will and Responsibility at FSU

The Philosophy Graduate Student Association (PGSA) of Florida State University is now accepting submissions for their graduate conference on free will and moral responsibility.

The conference will take place at Florida State University on September 28 and 29, 2012. Keynote speakers will be:

• Robert H. Kane, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin
• Alfred R. Mele, William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy, Florida State University

Those interested in submitting high quality papers related to free will and moral responsibility (including papers on the wider notion of agency) should email their submissions to fsupgsa@gmail.com. Papers should fulfill the following criteria:

• Prepared for blind review
• No more than 4,000 words
• Suitable for 25-minute presentation
• Preceded by an abstract of 150-250 words

Along with the paper, please also submit a cover page with the following information:

• Presenter’s name
• Institutional affiliation
• Contact information (email address or phone number)
• Title of paper
• Abstract of the paper
• Word count

The deadline for submissions is July 1. We will notify those whose papers have been accepted by August 12.

For questions or further information, please contact Kyle Fritz (kgf10@fsu.edu), Dan Miller (djm09@fsu.edu), or Robyn Waller (rar09h@fsu.edu).  

 

Free Will and Emotion

Just wanted to put up a quick note about an exciting new study on the relationship between people's emotions and their intuitions about free will.

It has often been suggested that people's belief in free will is affected in some way by their emotions. (For example, it might be that people are drawn to believe in free will because they are angered by certain wrong-doers and therefore motivated to believe that these wrong-doers are blameworthy.) Florian Cova and colleagues set out to test this hypothesis using a surprising new method. They found participants who suffered from a blunting in emotional response due to frontotemporal dementia and then checked to see how those participants thought about free will. The results were quite surprising...

Libertarianism may be crazy, but at least it isn't as bad as everything else

After you get done answering Al's query about philosophy of action, can you tell me where people say something like the title to this post? That is, can you think of passages where libertarians adopt something like a "last person standing" attitude about their account, i.e., sure libertarianism may be startling, but it is the least bad option left when you take a hard look at alternatives? 

On some level, I suspect incompatibilists of all stripes and a few compatibilists think their own views may be crazy, but that their preferred view is less bad than any of the alternatives. However, I'm looking for passages where libertarians suggest something like this view in a fairly explicit way. 

(John Doris asked me this question, and I couldn't answer, so I'm passing it on to you all.) 

 

I'll be participating in the Society for the Philosophy of Agency group meeting at the APA in Seattle. Following Manuel Vargas's lead, I'm asking for a little help. Below are some questions I'll be asked. What would you say?

Q. What are some of the central issues in action theory and what strikes you as the most interesting recent research development in the field?

Q. What do you see emerging as a potential hot research topic in action theory in the next 5 years? Beyond 5 years?

Other people will be talking about the X-phi of agency, moral psychology, free will, and science & human agency. So I think my topic is everything else in action theory (a.k.a. philosophy of action, philosophy of agency).

Thanks in advance for your advice.

Neuroscience again

Since we're on the topic of the relevance of neuroscience to free will, let me take the opportunity to engage in some shameful self-promotion. Over at Philosophy Bites, I discuss consciousness, neuroscience, free will and moral responsibility. Enjoy! Or endure! Or ignore!

 

CHE: Is Free Will an Illusion?

The Chronicle Review has published an interesting collection of essays on the relationship between recent developments in social psychology and neuroscience and free will.  Authors include Jerry Coyne, Al Mele, Michael Gazzaniga, Hilary Bok, Owen Jones, and Paul Bloom.  

Here is the introduction:

Free will has long been a fraught concept among philosophers and theologians. Now neuroscience is entering the fray.

For centuries, the idea that we are the authors of our own actions, beliefs, and desires has remained central to our sense of self. We choose whom to love, what thoughts to think, which impulses to resist. Or do we?

Neuroscience suggests something else. We are biochemical puppets, swayed by forces beyond our conscious control. So says Sam Harris, author of the new book, Free Will (Simon & Schuster), a broadside against the notion that we are in control of our own thoughts and actions. Harris's polemic arrives on the heels of Michael S. Gazzaniga's Who's In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain (HarperCollins), and David Eagleman's Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (Pantheon), both provocative forays into a debate that has in recent months spilled out onto op-ed and magazine pages, and countless blogs.

What's at stake? Just about everything: morality, law, religion, our understanding of accountability and personal accomplishment, even what it means to be human. Harris predicts that a declaration by the scientific community that free will is an illusion would set off "a culture war far more belligerent than the one that has been waged on the subject of evolution."

The Chronicle Review brought together some key thinkers to discuss what science can and cannot tell us about free will, and where our conclusions might take us.

Happy reading!

Accessible readings on reasons responsiveness?

If you were going to teach a group of undergrads about the current literature on free will and moral responsibility, what would you/do you use for reasons-responsiveness views? Ideally, for my purposes, it would be a piece that presents a fairly worked out view of what a Reasons-oriented view comes to, but that is also self-contained enough to do in a week without needing to read big chunks of a book. (Something like "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person" does for hierarchical views, for example.) Lots of definitive statements of such views seem to be in books where the argument is spread out over chapters, or such that they don't provide the sort of neat, discrete can-be-done-in-only-a-week format. But I could just be blanking on some obvious choices. 

For example, I'm (unsurprisingly) a fan of John Fischer's bit in Four Views on Free Will, but it doesn't spend a lot of time trying to flesh out his picture of moderate reasons responsiveness. I suppose there is the secondary literature route—there are some really good overviews of the literature out and coming out, so that might work. But if there is a good (perhaps great, or perhaps greatly underappreciated) article I should take a look at as a candidate for a piece that is accessible, self-contained, do-able in a week with undergrads who may not know much philosophy, then please let me know in the comments thread or via email. Thanks.

Intentions: Philosophical and Empirical Issues

Call for papers: Topoi conference and special issue 
Intentions: Philosophical and Empirical Issues 
Rome, Italy, 29-30 November 2012

We are proud to announce that the first Topoi Conference will be held in Rome in November 2012. This will be the first in a series of conferences, to be held every 2 years, sponsored by Topoi: An International Journal of Philosophy (http://www.springer.com/philosophy/journal/11245).

In analogy with the journal format, each conference will focus on a specific theme (topos), and contributions presented to the conference will later appear in an issue of the journal dedicated to the same topic.

INVITED SPEAKERS 
Marcel Brass (Ghent) 
Cristiano Castelfranchi (Rome) 
Elisabeth Pacherie (Paris) 
Corrado Sinigaglia (Milan)

SUBMITTED PAPERS 
Submissions of unpublished papers are welcome on any topic relevant to the conference theme (see below). Submitted articles should be in English, not exceed 5.000 words in length (including references), and be prepared for blind reviewing. Only original papers (i.e., not published or submitted for publication elsewhere) will be considered, since the authors of accepted contributions will be invited to submit a revised longer version of their papers for a special issue of Topoi, edited by Markus Schlosser (Leiden) and Fabio Paglieri (Rome).

Submission of papers by e-mail to: Fabio Paglieri (fabio.paglieri@istc.cnr.it) 
Accepted file formats: .doc, .rtf., .odp, .pdf 
Deadline for submission (full papers): 31 August 2012

RATIONALE AND THEME 
Theorizing about human action has a long history in philosophy, and the nature of intention and intentional action has received a lot of attention in recent analytic philosophy. At the same time, intentional action has become an empirically studied phenomenon in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Many results obtained in these areas have been incorporated within the current philosophical debate, while at the same time scientists have often adopted in their experiments and models philosophical assumptions on the nature of intention and intentional action. As a result, the study of intentions is nowadays a thriving enterprise, where both conceptual and empirical issues are discussed in a dialogue across disciplines.

At Last, Part II

Another eminently reasonable popular article on free will and neuroscience: A review in the Financial Times of several new books on free will, including Tamler's terrific book.