Seminar (SEM)

Topic: Free will

The topic of free will is a nexus at which many other philosophical issues meet: causation, laws of nature, time, substance, personhood, ontological reduction vs emergence, causal vs(?) reasons-based explanations. Within theistic metaphysics, it raises issues concerning the nature of God's agency and its relation to human action; in the human sciences, issues concerning the scope and limits of our freedom. We will closely read a representative sample of contemporary philosophical writing on human free will and through them explore many of the above issues. This writing has come to inhabit a complex, fascinating argumentative architecture. We will not have time to take up any of the rich historical discussion of our topic. However, participants with a special historical interest in are welcome to explore that interest in a course paper. We will move quickly from one sub-topic to the next on a weekly basis. Inevitably, some in the seminar will have more background knowledge in metaphysics or on the topic of free will. I'll try to make it possible for everyone to keep pace, but please don't become cross with me if you have to work a bit harder to do so than do some of your peers. (There are oodles of introductory resources available addressing each of the particular topics we'll take up. Don't panic if you struggle at first - this isn't philosophy of physics!) While advanced graduate student auditors are welcome as always, I will ensure that students taking the course for credit will get the lion's share of opportunities for speaking, and that first-years are well represented, too.