Even better than latkes and Xmas fruitcake!

The Invincible GFP Online Reading Group will be taking a short siesta over December. But that is only because we will have to store up our energy to handle the Return of the Invincible GFP Online Reading Group. Around January 15th, the Sensei of Semicompatibilism — the one, the only John Martin Fischer — will post opening comments on a chapter by the Incompatibilist Man of Mystery, Peter van Inwagen.

The subject matter is philosophical failure, and the reading comes from van Inwagen's new book The Problem of Evil, OUP (2006). Mad props (i.e., many thanks) to Oxford UP and Peter van Inwagen for allowing us to post a pdf of the chapter. Now go buy the book.

The reading is available now on a webpage near you.
The discussion kicks off here at the Garden of Funky Philosophers around January 15th.

Most cited, most sighted lists

Congrats to John Fischer, Susan Wolf, and Tom Nagel for writing free will-related books that made it into Eric Schwitzgebel's list of most-cited books in Ethics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Not a bad showing for free will at all.

Now if the list were of the most sighted, I think John would be even higher on that list.

Berofsky on Global Control

The latest issue of Philosophical Studies includes an article by Bernard Berofsky on global control (it also includes an article from fellow Gardener Kevin Timpe).  It is good to see this subject, which fascinates me, getting more attention.  But I found Berofsky's article to be frustrating reading.  My own feeling is that other compatibilists like Fischer and Mele and (or semicompatibilists and agnostics, as they prefer to be called) have wrestled with incompatibilist (or non-realist) global control arguments more, and given them more credit.  But others may, of course, decide for themselves and I would be very interested to know what other commentators think.

Let me offer some quick notes on the article:

Doris on Nichols: The Return of the Unstoppable GFP Reading Group

Dear Gardeners:
It’s my honor to comment publicly on Shaun Nichols’ “How Can Psychology Contribute to the Free Will Debate?”, since I’ve been consulting his work with great profit for years.  As is the philosophical convention, I offer repayment in the form of “higgling and haggling.”

Disclosures
My haggling commences early, with Nichols’ opening query.  Questions like  “Are people free and morally responsible?” (1),  invite the unwary to suppose that two questions “Are people free? And “Are people morally responsible?” require one answer; the implication is that the fate of freedom (in some to be specified metaphysical sense) and the fate of moral responsibility are intermingled.  But as Nichols is well aware, not everyone accepts this commingling of philosophical fates; like lots of folks, I’m inclined to answer “No and Yes”; people aren’t free, but they are (sometimes) morally responsible.  My reasons for thinking this are numbingly familiar:  I’m (something like) an incompatiblist about determinism and freedom and (something like) a compatiblist about determinism and responsibility (see Fischer 1999), and I share the suspicion, voiced by people like Pereboom (2001) and Sommers (2005), that it wouldn’t help much if determinism were false.  I’m moved by considerations in the neighborhood of what Nichols (9) calls “Hobbes’ libertarian dilemma,” and I join the chorus of cranky metaphysical philistines in claiming to find agent-causal libertarian accounts of freedom verging on unintelligible.   In short, I’ve P-Strawsonian sympathies of a decidedly unpanicky sort, and that makes me think that the tractable questions in the areas of action theory and moral psychology have to do with responsibility rather than freedom, and that these tractable questions are all the questions we need.

Enough about me.  What do I think about Nichols (1) Three (interrelated) Projects?  By way of kicking off our discussion, I’ll say something about the descriptive, prescriptive, and substantive projects, in that order.

Roskies on Neuroscientific Challenges to Free Will

The unstoppable philosopher/neuroscientist Adina Roskies has a new paper on 'Neuroscientific Challenges to Free Will and Moral Responsibility.' 

In essence, she argues that it is a mistake to think that work in neuroscience could in any way threaten our sense that human choice is indeterministic.  If we learn that the universe is deterministic, it will have to be from discoveries in physics.  Perhaps physics will show that the universe is deterministic, perhaps it won't... but neuroscience won't end up settling the question either way.  (After all, theoretical models in neuroscience are always probabilistic.) 

I'd be interested to hear what the experts here at the Garden think of this argument.  Do you think that neuroscience really can provide a challenge to our conception of ourselves as free and morally responsible, or should we conclude that the whole issue is -- as Roskies suggests -- a red herring? 

Reminders, new articles, and whatnots

1. Doris vs. Nichols vs. You vs. Everyon else on this blog! Or, Doris+Nichols+You+The Rest of this Bog = Reading Group Love. Consider this your reminder to do this month's reading for our ongoing online reading group. This month's masterpiece is Shaun Nichols' "How can psychology contribute to the free will debate." This paper is available here.

2. Special issue on the work of our very own John Martin Fischer in the current issue of Journal of Ethics. Available here.

3. Article by our very own Kevin Timpe in the latest issue of Philosophical Studies, available here.

4. A review by our very own Saul Smilansky of our very own Al Mele's latest book, available at NDPR here (and free!). Lots of "very owns" around here.

5. I'm sure there's been other stuff that just made its way on to the internets. Apologies for anything I missed from the past month. Feel free to post more current publications of interest in the comments below.

6. Lots of explicating and debating things free will-ish at the University of San Francisco this Friday. Gardeners who can make it are more than welcome. More info here.

Frayn on freedom

Novelist Michael Frayn has published The Human Touch, a book of straight-up philosophy.  In review, Simon Blackburn (TLS, Oct. 20) writes:

Quotation is irresistible, so here he is on agency, or the will, starting from the idea that I am in control of my actions, the monarch of my fate:

a sovereign of the old school I had always felt myself to be, benevolent but absolute, the source of all the edicts that constitute the fabric of the court and its business, the master of my own revels.  Now that it has pleased me to command this inquiry into my own authority, however, I discover that I am not an absolute ruler after all.  I am a mere constitutional fiction, a face on the postage stamps, a signature at the bottom of decrees written by unidentified powers behind the throne over which I have no control....even my private entertainments are devised for me by invisible courtiers working in parts of the palace that I have never entered, and could never find may way to go.

Surely this is a passage to put alongside Schopenhauer's image of the still water in the pond thinking how it could leap and splash if it wished, or Wittgenstein's image of the leaves in autumn, saying "Now I shall go this way, now I shall go that way," as a classic expression of the thoughts that lead to the disappearance of the notion of free will.

It is good on its own and stands up well to the competition.  It is also more subversive.  Rather than jibing at the silliness of anthropomorphic projection, it puts homunculi to work dismantling the presumption from within.