Return of the Willies

Last year Tamler put together a humorous set of free will awards he dubbed "The Willies." His categories included:

Best Essay Title; Truest Essay Title; Best Opening Paragraph; Greatest Paper to Have Had a Positive Impact on the Debate; Greatest Paper to Have Had a Negative Impact on the Debate; Most Underappreciated Participant in the Debate; Most Respected Position within the Industry; Least Respected Position within the Industry; Best Neglected Paper; Best Writer; Most Neglected Aspect of the Debate; . . . and perhaps my favorite category: Best Derogatory Remark about Compatibilism!

With Tamler's cooperation and blessing, we'd like to try a similarly humorous run at these things involving the whole GFP community. The basic idea is that you nominate candidates and categories, and through some yet-to-be-fully-determined process (insert your favorite libertarian joke here, followed by your favorite complaint about equivocation about indeterminism), and Tamler and I will cull that list down and pass it on to be voted upon by some Famous People Whose Judgment is Way Better Than Manuel's But That Manuel and Tamler Happen To Know And Happen to Ask.

To put some kind of civilizing constraints on these things:
    1. For publications, keep it to work or views published in 2004 or 2005.
    2. Let's avoid negative ad hominem stuff (i.e., let's not suggest people or categories that will involve the disintegration of our online community. Really, no one wants to be widely acclaimed as the most annoying blog contributor. Or, at least, I'd rather not know that you think I'm the most annoying blog contributor.)
    3. Do use your imagination (ala "Best derogatory comment about compatibilism")
    4. Don't feel afraid to post multiple candidates under any heading, nor to add candidates as you remember things later on or get reminded by other posters.

Some immediate categories that spring to my mind:

1. Best recent published article ('04-'05)
2. Best Garden Post at Getting a Spirited Discussion Going ('04-'05)
3. Free Will Person Most Likely to Be Seen At a Conference (my nominee- Al Mele: the guy is everywhere!)
4. Talk or Conference You Missed But Wish You Had Been At ('04-'05)
5. Dead Philosopher You Would Most Like Reanimate To Explain What the Hell He Really Meant When He Wrote On Free Will (change to "she" as applicable)
6. Best one-liner, sentence, or slogan in a talk or paper ('04-'05)
7. Best derogatory comment about incompatibilism (all time)

You can also always email me with your ideas. If for some reason you aren't comfortable posting suggestions, feel free to email them to me and I can post 'em without identifying the author, or if you like, I can just pass it on quietly to the afore-mentioned Famous People. And again, multiple candidates for categories are encouraged!

If we get enough response quickly enough, perhaps we'll close nomination on Halloween and try to get a verdict soon after.

Get to nominating!

Comments

[Manuel]

and for the record, I think we needn't dispute that the Best Blog on Free Will is the Garden of Forking Paths.

[John Fischer]

How about:

Best first published article (about free will/moral responsibility)
Best book on free will/moral responsibility (published in 04-05)
Most obscure reference to a historical figure writing about free will/moral resp.

I should be able to come up with some better ideas, but that's a start...

[Dan]

Free willer most likely also to be a spy (I think "Derk" is a name for someone in espionage... but our Derk doesn't look all that mysterious to me. Well, maybe that's the point).

Free willer with most papers forthcoming in Phil Topics.

Most anthologized paper on free will.

Best review of a book on free will.

Best deparment for the conjunction of Action theory and intercollegiate atheletics (perhaps this one could be broken out for football, basketball, etc... ok, forget the "etc". We don't want a ranking of field hockey programs).

Most self-destructive thing said by a Garden Job-seeker in an interview or job talk (I have few. God, I'm an idiot!).

Best personal website for a free will philosopher.

[Neil]

Before I get to my nomination, I just want to remind folks of some of the significant publications of 04/05:

Books:

Honderich, On Freedom and Determinism;
Kane, A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will;
Watson, Agency and Answerability;
Campbell, O'Rourke and Shier, Freedom and Determinism .

Special issues of journals:
Philosophical Exploration
Symposium on semi-compatibilism (June 2005);
Midwest Studies in Philosophy (September 2005).

Those are just reminders. Here's my nominations:

Most interesting new approach to the problem of free will. The nominees are: (1) Surveying folk intuitions (sample papers: Nahmias, et al. 'Is incompatibilism intuitive', P&PR forthcoming; Nichols, 'The Folk Psychology of Free Will', Mind & Language 2004); (2) The phenomenology of free will (sample paper: Nahmias et al. 'The Phenomenology of Free Will', Journal of Consciousness Studies 2004).

[Manuel]

John- those are some great ideas. I especially like the most obscure reference to a historical figure writing about free will/moral responsibility. I'll have to think of candidates for that one. I'm guessing there is at least one paper on the theological dimensions of the free will problem footnoting some medieval guy I've never heard of.

Here's one obvious candidate for best book: Randy Clarke's Libertarian Accounts of Free Will. Also, although I haven't read Al Mele's latest (or latest two?) yet, I suspect I'll think that it should be in that group when I have read it. I'm sure I'm missing something. Are there recent anthologies I'm not thinking of? If single issues of a journal count, I'd nominate the recent Midwest Studies volume, although I'm hardly impartial about it.

Best first published article: By sheer numbers alone, maybe a Nahmias et.al. paper counts for some of that crew?

Neal, Gustavo, what Garden posts have the longest comment threads? Those should be nominated for something.

How 'bout:
Favorite problem? My vote: Trying to convince libertarians to switch teams

Least favorite problem? My vote: Frankfurt cases (sorry John! and Harry!) Important, to be sure, but definitely not my favorite problem to deal with.

Finally: paper you've taught the most? I'd probably have to say "Freedom and Resentment"

[Manuel]

Doh! I'd forgotten the Watson and Campbell, et. al. collections! I thought that Honderich book had been out for a while? Is it a reissue? The Kane book is primarily an undergrad text, right?

[Neil]

I think Randy's book would win hands down, if it were (is) eligible. I left it off the list b/c it was published (in hardback in 2003). Al's new book ( Free Will and Luck isn't due out till next year.

How about a special category for all of us who read a lot of empirical literature: most question-begging argument by yet another scientist who claims to have proven that there is no such thing as free will.

[Neal]

Some category suggestions:

Free Willer to have the most influence on the non-philosophical world ('04-'05)

Best attempt to start the bonfire of freedom (by flanning the flickers, of course)

Compatibilist/Incompatibilist who we would nominate to defend the view in a highly televised public debate about the free will problem

Best new conceptual distinction made about free will where we previously thought there was none

Most likely to convince universities to consider "Free Will/Moral Responsibility" a legitimate AOS!

[Neal]

Top three posts at the Garden to have generated the largest comment thread:

1) Kip Werking's April 2005 post, "Why Should Compatibilists Care About Being Causa Sui?", with 82 comments.

2) Randy Clarke's August 2004 post, "Deny or Deflate", with 59 comments.

3) My July 2005 post, "Determinism and Counterfactuals", with 50 posts.

That's a lot of philosophical discussion!

[John Fischer]

Manuel,

I think the Frankfurt examples are NOT Harry Frankfurt's favorite, or even close. I think he once described them as for "young people", or something like that. (This suggests a kind of fountain of youth, at least for enthusiasts like me.) Ah well, De gustibus non disputandum est.

[Neil]

I think the Frankfurt examples are NOT Harry Frankfurt's favorite, or even close

Marx is reputed to have said that he wasn't a Marxist. Is Frankfurt a Frankfurt-style compatibilist?

[John Fischer]

Neil,
Good question. Frankfurt is not a compatibilist, as far as I know. (This comes out in his reply to my piece in the Overton/Buss collection with MIT Press.) He takes himself to be knocking down objections to compatibilism. But he doesn't quite embrace compatibilism, because he thinks reponsibility requires being active (rather than passive), and he doesn't know whether causal determinism is compatible with being active. Although he certainly suggests that he is a compatibilist in earlier work, I am not aware of an explicit commitment by Frankfurt to compatibilism. So, whereas I am a Frankfurt-style compatibilist, I cannot count Frankfurt among this cohort (yet--there is always hope).

[Neil]

Perhaps he'll come out as a Fischer-style compatibilist.

[Jonathan Farrell]

I assume that anyone awarded a Willie will be presented with a gold statuette of an orca, right?

[John Fischer]

A whale of an idea, Jonathan.

Some more category suggestions:

Most surprising idea about free will/moral resp. (surprising that it came from him/her).

Most profound or suggestive idea about free will/moral resp.

Most initially outlandish but upon reflection possibly defensible idea about free will/moral resp.

[Kip Werking]

I emailed Manuel this suggestion:

Best school at which to study the Free Will Problem/Agency Theory.

[Tamler Sommers]

Hi everyone,

Keep 'em coming. Manuel and I thought we'd have one more day of a total free for all. Then we'll cut it down to a managable number of categories and ask the Garden for nominations sometime tomorrow.

Here my suggestion for a category (In a similar vein to Manuel's): Philosopher who didn't write on free will who you'd most want to dig up, or approach if still alive, to see what he or she thought (thinks) about free will.

As for Manuel's dead philosopher category--I nominate David Hume.

[Eddy Nahmias]

"Most initially outlandish but upon reflection possibly defensible idea about free will/moral resp."

I nominate van Inwagen's "metaphysical flipflopping" (Fischer's nice label--perhaps to be nominated for best label). This is the position that (put from PvI's perspective): I strongly believe that FW and MR are incompatible with determinism (don't my arguments make that manifestly clear?), but if determinism were shown to be true, then I would believe compatibilism is true. Why? Because I believe most strongly that we are MR and that FW is required for MR.

Sounds crazy, especially to a "FW/MR skeptic" who thinks, "why wouldn't you just become a hard determinist?" But I think it is less crazy than it sounds, though I'm not quite sure why I think that yet.
(I think we've had a post about this before and I don't want to start something on this post, but if there's interest, we should start a discussion in a new post--I know there's been a few articles discussing PvI's flipflopping--not to be confused with the many articles about Kerry flipflopping or about women wearing flipflops to the White House).

[Mark Smeltzer]

For the converse of John's category suggestion, "Most initially possibly defensible but upon reflection outlandish idea about free will/moral resp," I *would* joinly nominate PVI's consequence argument and GS's "basic" argument, *but* they don't fall within the 2004 - 2005 timeline.

;)

[Tamler Sommers]

I don't think we should entirely restrict ourselves to the 2004-2005 timeline. It looks like the best way to do this is to have certain categories--like best paper, best book, best new approach etc-- observe that timeline and let other categories dig deeper into the past.

[John Fischer]

Eddy: Dan Speak has some interesting things to say in defense of PvI about flipflopping. And, btw, I'd say Bush is the biggest flipflopper of them all!

In the category, most expensive book or set of books on free will, I nominate my own four volume set with Routledge: Critical Concepts in Philosophy: FREE WILL. This comes in at the modest price of approx. 900 dollars. But you DO gets lots for your money...

[Kip Werking]

Tamler, I nominated Hume too.

And I'm pretty sure we have Paul Russell's vote. :)

[Tamler Sommers]

An Essay on Free Will... $49.95

Freedom Within Reason (paperback)... $27.95

John Fischer's four volume Routledge Anthology: Free Will... $900

Coming to understand that we are not free in such a way that we can be deserving of praise or blame for our actions... Priceless.

[John Fischer]

Tammler,

Hey, as they say, you get what you pay for...

Btw, my parents stark choice: either by my book, or pay for prescription medication for a month... [not really]

[Manuel]

Various suggestions/nominations emailed to me (i.e., these are posted on behalf of others)

Best Paper: Defending Hard Incompatibilism (Pereboom)

Best Phrase: "a kind of metaphysical megalomania." (Fischer, The Cards
That Are Dealt You)

Conference I would have like to have attended: MIT Brains conference

Philosopher I want to bring back from the dead: Hume

[Neal]

How about:

Most neglected philosophical issue that is relevant to the free will problem

I might vote for an examination of laws of nature, or perhaps the nature of time.