>-- The Garden of Forking Paths --<

Philosophy of Action Papers

In the comments of Manuel's post, there's some interest in doing for philosophy of action what Leiter has done for philosophy more generally: attempt to construct a "Best of the Decade" list.  So rather than hijack Manuel's post, I thought I'd start a thread just for coming up with this list. 

My list below the fold:

Free Will makes the top 10 philosophy problems for the 21st century

Continuing its multi-century (perhaps multi-millenial) position in the top 10 of philosophical problems, free will keeps on trucking for another century. 

This time, the challenge is the onslaught from science. 

So sez PhilosophyTalk. 

For the record, free will beat out the mind-body problem. Which suggests to me that it is time for Rutgers and any other phil mind-heavy places to start hiring all the free will folks to replace all their phil mind folks, as this will surely increase their rankings in the Gourmet Report. Of course, if we followed the PhilTalk list, the sure-fire way to get to the top of the pile would be to hire lots of environmental ethicists and global justice-types. Something for you job marketeers to keep in mind for your interviews. 

(See how I subtly snuck in the annual implication of special job market woes for phil action peeps? You job marketeers are most welcome. Really though, to all Gardeners on the market, may you have incredibly good luck over the next week and months.) 

Gazzaniga and the Gifford Lectures

Michael Gazzaniga was recently honored with the opportunity to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures.  Fortunately for those of us who were not there to see his exciting series of talks, the good folks at the University of Edinburgh were kind enough to make them available on-line.  I have posted the lectures over at the Law and Neuroscience Blog (see here) where you can now watch all five talks.  Having watched through them in the past few days, I strongly encourage you to check them out--especially if you happen to be unfamiliar with his groundbreaking work on split brains and the interpreter module.  If you don't have time to watch them all, Gazzaniga talks about the relevance of his work to the free will problem in the fourth talk.

FSU Experimental Philosophy Conference

The Florida State University Department of Philosophy presents The William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister Conference on Experimental Philosophy on 15-17 January 2010. The topic of this year’s conference is Experimental Philosophy. Speakers will include Roy Baumeister, John Doris, Joshua Knobe, Shaun Nichols, Laurie Paul, David Pizarro, and Kathleen Vohs.

More details are available here.

Follow up on the Survey

For those who haven't seen it, there is a discussion over at Leiter on the survey, with special reference to the (alleged) connection between libertarianism and theism. This is a topic worth its own thread, I think.

My observation, for what it's worth, slightly orthogonal to the theism causes/correlates with libertarianism. Free will is a mainly US debate. There are few people in Australia and the UK, or on the continent, who have it as a major research interest. The US is also an outlier on reliigous world among developed countries. I suspect there is a connection. Two hypotheses: Christians, in particular, often think that libertarian free will is needed to justify divine reward and punishment (heaven and hell are pretty heavy duty sanctions). That keeps the debate going in the US, making it a focus in undergraduate courses and interesting both theists and atheists. Second hypothesis: if religion is personally gripping for a person, so is the problem of evil. This problem motivates interest in free will as a solution (and we get the extra US interest in the topic).

Philpapers Survey Results

The results of the philpapers survey are here. I was surprised by how low the proportion of compatibilists turned out to be: 59%. Libertarianism, no free will and 'other' don't differ significantly from each other, which is also surprising. Thoughts? In particular, what is the 'other' view which is so popular? Some kind of Double-style subjectivism? Or is this the result of over-scrupulousness on the part of semi-compatibilists? C'mon guys, John wrote the chapter on compatibilism in the Four Views book...