Happy 3rd birthday!

Believe it or not, our blog is now three years old.  That's right, the official welcome post was made on May 31, 2004.

What an excellent three years it has been.  Thanks very much to all of our contributors -- all 48 of you! -- and to the countless others who have either commented on our posts or just stopped by for a visit.  Thanks are also due to John Fischer and the UC Riverside philosophy department for financial assistance and administrative and moral support. I'm not sure that blogging has been around long enough for there to be any criteria for what counts as a "successful" blog, but any plausible criteria will certainly have to count the Garden as a success.

Some numbers for those who are interested in such things:

Total number of posts: 328

Total number of comments: 3242

Total number of visits to the Garden: 299,938

Average visits per day: 273

Free Will in the OPC

The admirably-managed Online Philosophy Conference is now in its second week, and there are two papers that Gardeners should find especially interesting.

John Martin Fischer has a paper on the Direct Argument, with comments by Randy Clarke and David Widerker.  Check it out here and add to the discussion!

Derk Pereboom has a paper on compatibilism and deliberation, with comments by Dana Nelkin and Joe Campbell.  Check it out here and add to the discussion!

Llarull Wins Baricelli Award

Congrats to our very own Gustavo Llarull, who has won the Baricelli Award in recognition for his interdisciplinary work on philosophy and literature.  His dissertation (in progress) explores the fascinating issue of what sort of contribution reading great works of literature might make to our moral sensibilities. (Dissertation spoiler: A significant contribution indeed!)  As part of this honor, Gustavo is giving a lecture entitled "Narrative Self-Conception, Ethics, and Literature" to the UCR Comparative Literature Department this Wednesday from 11am-noon.  Good work Gustavo!

USF Conference on Responsibility, Agency, and Persons

I'll be hosting a small conference on things free will-ish at the University of San Francisco on October 26th and 27th, 2007. The papers will be by Up-And-Coming-Philosophers and commentary by Already-Really-Famous-Philosophers.

Info and the lineup of speakers can be found here: http://www.usfca.edu/fac-staff/mrvargas/Conferences/Indexical/CRAP/Welcome.html

Talks are open to the public and Gardeners are especially welcome.

Fear and Fancy: Free Will Fruit Flies

Tom Clark called my attention to a couple of recent news articles that should excite and horrify Gardeners on several levels.

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070514/full/070514-8.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSN1532077920070516

As far as I can tell, the principle upshot of this data is that vegetarians must now give up eating fruit because of the risk of inadvertently killing free agents.

OPC2 is On!

The Second Annual Online Philosophy Conference (OPC2) has begun!  Please go to the conference website to see the line-up of this week’s talks, which include a video of Ernie Sosa’s keynote address and papers by Meredith Williams, Delia Graff Fara, Shaun Nichols, and Juan Comesana.  Each talk includes one or two commentaries.  And the discussion thread is waiting for your questions and comments.  Next week will feature six more talks!

Please check out the conference, read some papers and commentaries, and participate in the discussion with this excellent group of philosophers.  You can enjoy this conference for free (though we encourage donations to the conference charities linked at the site).  Please spread the word among your colleagues, friends, and students!

Four Views on Free Will

I'm sure everyone will be excited to hear that Four Views on Free Will, by Fischer, Kane, Pereboom, and Vargas, is now in print.  Click here to see the Blackwell site.  This book makes an excellent contribution both to the contemporary debate and to the growing library of accessible books on free will that are amenable to teaching undergraduates.  Congratulations and good work to all four of the authors, and especially to Manuel for conceiving and organizing the project.

P.S. When you pick up your copy of this book, be sure to spend a few moments in admiration of the index...

Conference on Agency at Indiana U.

Allen Gehring has drawn my attention to a conference on Agency and Responsibility to be held at Indiana University, Bloomington this fall.  More details are below, and the conference website is here.

Agency at the Intersection

We are pleased to announce the 2007 Conference on Agency and Responsibility, to be held at Indiana University, Bloomington on September 13-15, 2007. This conference will bring together philosophers from the diverse areas of ethics, metaphysics, and the cognitive sciences at their intersection point of human agency. Invited speakers include Richard Holton (MIT), Jennifer Hornsby (Birkbeck College), Al Mele (Florida State U), Shaun Nichols (U Arizona), Adina Roskies (Dartmouth), Angela Smith (U Washington), and R. Jay Wallace (UC Berkeley).

A complete list of commentators and invited participants can be found at the conference web site. Registration is $40. Rooms are available at the Indiana Memorial Union Biddle Hotel and Conference Center. Further information regarding registration and accommodations can be found online.

Join us for a three-day extended discussion on the beautiful wooded campus of Indiana University, home of outstanding departments of Philosophy, History and Philosophy of Science, and a large, world-class program in Cognitive Science.

Further comments and inquiries can be directed to agenresp@indiana.edu.

Conference address: http://www.indiana.edu/~agenresp

Smilansky, Van Inwagen, and You

Once again, the Indomitable GFP Reading Group of Destiny returns with another action-packed episode, with enough chills, thrills, and spills to keep you bathed in the glow of your monitor just a bit longer. In this episode, the Hero of Haifa - a mild mannered professor usually known as Saul Smilansky-  swings into action to test the the Sultan of South Bend, his excellency Peter van Inwagen. The target? The Sultan's forthcoming edict: "How to Think About the Problem of Free Will."

Will the edict stand? Will the Hero prevail? Who will the people favor? Dear reader, only YOU can decide.

Saul's comments begin below . . . .

(Thanks to Saul and Peter)
---------------
Peter van Inwagen’s paper “How to Think about the Problem of Free Will” is written with his usual admirable clarity, force, and scope. Anyone working or thinking seriously about the free will problem, whatever his or her position, will benefit from reading this challenging paper. It can help us to open up a meta-free will debate, about what it is valuable to discuss at all, and how. And the stakes are high: Peter calls for no less than a radical change in the whole direction of the contemporary free will debate. The fact that this proposed transformation is traditionalist, wishing to take us back to the golden past, should not hide from us the truly revolutionary nature of this paper. If Peter is right, many (and perhaps most) of us have been wasting our time, while if he were to be widely followed and is mistaken about the debate, as I believe that he is, this would set back the philosophical investigation of the free will issue enormously.

Peter does a number of things in his paper, and I will not be able to address them all. After briefly presenting some of his main contentions, I shall make a preliminary point, and then sketch a very different construal of what the free will problem is about.