Positive Illusions and the Free Will Debate

I am quite confident that all of the Gardeners are busy readying themselves to spend some quality time with their friends and family over the holidays (and rightly so!).  So, I have no illusions (pun intended) concerning the likelihood that people will have time left in 2007 to take a glance at the paper I wrote with one of my undergrads here at Dickinson (Tatyana Matveeva).  But since I thought some of you might nevertheless have time to read it after the new year and before the beginning of spring semester, I figured now might be a better time to post it than once we're all back to work in mid to late January.  For now, have a delightful break! 

Download positive_illusions.pdf

Happy Holidays

Judging by the recent lack of activity, people have probably already gone on vacation from philosophy for a few weeks. I'm about to do the same myself, but before I go, I wanted to say two things:

First, we seem to be having the same comment problem that PEA Soup describes here. I'll try to check the spam filter for stray comments over the next couple of weeks, but my internet access will be intermittent, so just be patient if your comment doesn't appear immediately.

Second, I wish everyone a happy holidays! See you next year.

Free Will and Wishful Thinking

To see how wishful thinking might relate to the free will problem, consider Shaun Nichols’ excellent article “The Rise of Compatibilism: A Case Study in the Quantitative History of Philosophy.”  In that article, Nichols wrote:

“Many of us incompatibilists think we know the answer to this: it’s wishful thinking!  Philosophers embrace compatibilism because they want it to be true. This view is, I think, common among incompatibilists.”

Of course, compatibilists are not the only ones who raise suspicions about wishful thinking.  When I think of wishful thinking, I think of libertarianism—which strikes me as not unlike creationism in its speculative physics and religious undertones.  But even those who would deny the existence of free will are not immune to these accusations.  I can think of at least the following five ways in which wishful thinking can infect free will theorists:

Two Announcements

First, the department of philosophy at Florida State University is hosting the Werkmeister Conference on Free Will & Science in January. Check out the conference program by clicking on the link in the previous sentence.

Second, the excellent radio show run by Ken Taylor and John Perry, Philosophy Talk, is considering changing their name for reasons outlined by Ken Taylor here. He is asking for suggestions for a new name, so if you have any great ideas, head over there to let him know. Anything we can do to help keep this show on the air and widely distributed is, I think, well worth doing.

A little holiday cheer

Click here to see how our Free Will Friends from Florida have contributed to the obligatory spreading of joy that the holiday season is all about. Or perhaps, as John Fischer suggested to me, this is what Michael, Al, and Randy must resort to in a desperate attempt to compete with the charms of UC Riverside. (Though it certainly has made me second-guess my decision to come to UCR...)

Be warned: clicking that link will lead almost immediately to an outburst of laughter, so click at your own risk, and probably not in a library, where I was the first time I saw it.

(Thanks to Chris Zarpentine, grad student at FSU, for putting this together. And thanks to Michael, Al, and Randy for their good humor.)