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21Surrounding Free Will: Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 2014.This volume showcases cutting-edge scholarship from The Big Questions in Free Will project, funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation and directed by Alfred R. Mele. It explores the subject of free will from the perspectives of neuroscience; social, cognitive, and developmental psychology; and philosophy. The volume consists of fourteen new articles and an introduction from top-ranked contributors, all of whom bring fresh perspectives to the question of free will. They investigate que…Read more
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32Free Will and LuckOxford University Press USA. 2006.Mele's ultimate purpose in this book is to help readers think more clearly about free will. He identifies and makes vivid the most important conceptual obstacles to justified belief in the existence of free will and meets them head on. Mele clarifies the central issue in the philosophical debate about free will and moral responsibility, criticizes various influential contemporary theories about free will, and develops two overlapping conceptions of free will - one for readers who are convinced t…Read more
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D.N. Walton, "Courage: A philosophical investigation"International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 23 (2): 117. 1988.
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3GF Schueler, Desire: Its Role in Practical Reason and the Explanation of Action (review)Minds and Machines 6 253-256. 1996.
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15The Significance of Free Will (review)Journal of Philosophy 95 (11): 581-584. 1998.A book review of Robert Kane's The Significance of Free Will.
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78Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry FrankfurtAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 81 (2): 292-295. 2003.Book Information Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt. Edited by Sarah Buss and Lee Overton. MIT Press. Cambridge MA. 2002. Pp. 381.
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15Free Will and Consciousness: How Might They Work? (New York: OUP, 2010) (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2010.This volume is aimed at readers who wish to move beyond debates about the existence of free will and the efficacy of consciousness and closer to appreciating how free will and consciousness might operate. It draws from philosophy and psychology, the two fields that have grappled most fundamentally with these issues. In this wide-ranging volume, the contributors explore such issues as how free will is connected to rational choice, planning, and self-control; roles for consciousness in decision ma…Read more
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23Emotion and Desire in Self-DeceptionRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 52 163-179. 2003.According to a traditional view of self-deception, the phenomenon is an intrapersonal analogue of stereotypical interpersonal deception. In the latter case, deceiversintentionallydeceive others into believing something,p, and there is a time at which the deceivers believe thatpis false while their victims falsely believe thatpis true. If self-deception is properly understood on this model, self-deceivers intentionally deceive themselves into believing something,p, and there is a time at which th…Read more
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31Practical Mistakes and Intentional ActionsAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 43 (3). 2006.Sometimes we forget to do what we intended to do. For example, we intend to buy some milk on the way home from work, but we forget and drive home, as usual. In situations of this kind, what do we do unintentionally and what do we do intentionally? That is this article's guiding question.
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25Can Libertarians Make Promises?In John Hyman & Helen Steward (eds.), Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, Cambridge University Press. pp. 217-241. 2004.Libertarians hold that free action and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism and that some human beings occasionally act freely and are morally responsible for some of what they do. Can libertarians who know both that they are right and that they are free make sincere promises? Peter van Inwagen, a libertarian, contends that they cannot—at least when they assume that should they do what they promise to do, they would do it freely. Probably, this strikes many readers as a surpris…Read more
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16Passive ActionIn Ghitta Holstrom-Hintikka & Raimo Tuomela (eds.), Contemporary Action Theory, Volume 1, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1997.Peter was placed — face down and head first — on a sled, and pushed from the top of a high, snow-covered hill. The brisk wind and flying snow swiftly awoke him. In moments, he had his wits about him and surmised that this early morning trip down the hill was part of his initiation into the SAE fraternity. Peter quickly surveyed his options. He could put an end to his trip by sliding off the sled, or by turning it sharply. He could grasp the steering handles and guide the sled down the slope. Or,…Read more
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62Surrounding Free Will: A Response to Baumeister, Crescioni, and Alquist (review)Neuroethics 4 (1): 25-29. 2010.This contribution to a symposium on an article by Roy Baumeister, A. William Crescioni, and Jessica Alquist focuses on a tension between compatibilist and incompatibilist elements in that article. In their discussion of people’s beliefs about free will, Baumeister et al. sometimes sound like incompatibilists; but in their presentation of their work on psychological processes of free will, they sound more like compatibilists than like incompatibilists. It is suggested that Baumeister and coauthor…Read more
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248Free: Why Science Hasn't Disproved Free WillOxford University Press USA. 2014.Does free will exist? The question has fueled heated debates spanning from philosophy to psychology and religion. The answer has major implications, and the stakes are high. To put it in the simple terms that have come to dominate these debates, if we are free to make our own decisions, we are accountable for what we do, and if we aren't free, we're off the hook.There are neuroscientists who claim that our decisions are made unconsciously and are therefore outside of our control and social psych…Read more
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140A Dialogue on Free Will and ScienceOup Usa. 2013.A Dialogue on Free Will and Science is a brief and intriguing book discussing the scientific challenges of free will. Presented through a dialogue, the format allows ideas to emerge and be clarified and then evaluated in a natural way. Engaging and accessible, it offers students a compelling look at free will and science
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42Noninstrumental rationalizingPacific Philosophical Quarterly 79 (3). 1998.A central notion in Donald Davidson's philosophy of mind and action is "rationalization," a species of causal explanation designed in part to reveal the point or purpose of the explananda. An analogue of this notion - noninstrumental rationalization - merits serious attention. I develop an account of this species of rationalization and display its utility in explaining the production of certain desires and of motivationally biased beliefs.
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25Causation, Action, and Free WillIn H. Beebee, C. Hitchcock & P. Menzies (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Causation, Oxford University Press. 2009.Many issues at the heart of the philosophy of action and of philosophical work on free will are framed partly in terms of causation. The leading approach to understanding both the nature of action and the explanation or production of actions emphasizes causation. What may be termed standardcausalism is the conjunction of the following two theses: firstly, an event's being an action depends on how it was caused; and secondly, proper explanations of actions are causal explanations. Important quest…Read more
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26Intentions and InterpretationsMLN 107 (5): 931-949. 1992.Even if everything is up for grabs in philosophy, some things are very difficult to doubt. It is hard to believe, for example, that no one ever acts intentionally. Even the most powerful arguments for the unreality of intentional action could do no more, we believe, than place one in roughly the position in which pre-Aristotelian Greeks found themselves when presented with one of Zeno's arguments that nothing can move from any given point A to any other point B. One argument has it, for example,…Read more
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34?Self-deception, action, and will?: CommentsErkenntnis 18 (2): 159-164. 1982.Since the virtues of Professor Audi's paper are obvious and my time is limited, 1 shall restrict myself here to negative comments. I shall argue, first, that condition (1) - the unconscious true belief condition - in Audi's account of "clear cases of self-deception" is too strong and, second, that he does not succeed in justifying his limitation of the self-deceiver to sincere avowals of the proposition with respect to which he is in self-deception.
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101Free Will and ScienceIn R. Kane (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Free Will, 2nd edition, Oxford University Press. 2011.This article examines the work of two figures in fields whose work has had a significant impact on recent free-will debates, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet and psychologist Daniel Wegner. Libet's groundbreaking experimental studies on human subjects relating brain activities to the appearance or production of conscious experience, volition, and willed action have been much discussed by philosophers and scientists over the past few decades and have influenced subsequent scientific research on thes…Read more
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70Against a belief/desire analysis of intentionPhilosophia 18 (2-3): 239-242. 1988.An influential belief/desire analysis of intention proposed by robert audi does not provide sufficient conditions for intention. Intending to "a" entails being settled upon "a"-Ing (or upon trying to "a"), And it entails being willing to "a". But an agent can satisfy audi's conditions for intending to "a" and yet be neither settled upon "a"-Ing (or trying to "a") nor willing to "a". The objection raised poses a serious problem for belief/desire analyses of intention in general
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136Unconscious decisions and free willPhilosophical Psychology 26 (6): 777-789. 2013.It is sometimes claimed that certain experiments show that free will is an illusion by showing that all decisions are made unconsciously. I have argued elsewhere that these experiments do not show that any decisions are made unconsciously. But suppose I am wrong about that. Even then, I argue, these experiments do not pose a serious threat to free will. First, one is not warranted in generalizing from findings about the decisions allegedly made in these experiments to the claim that all decision…Read more
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70Is there a place for intention in an analysis of intentional action?Philosophia 27 (3-4): 419-432. 1999.My concern here with the possibility of an acceptable intention-involving explication of intentional action is, specifically, a concern with the possibility of such an explication that treats intentions as attitudes.
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200Moral responsibility for actions: epistemic and freedom conditionsPhilosophical Explorations 13 (2): 101-111. 2010.Two questions guide this article. First, according to Fischer and Ravizza (jointly and otherwise), what epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for performing an action A are not also requirements for freely performing A? Second, how much progress have they made on this front? The article's main moral is for philosophers who believe that there are epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for A-ing that are not requirements for freely A-ing because they assume that Fische…Read more
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78Approaching self-deception: How Robert Audi and I part companyConsciousness and Cognition 19 (3): 745-750. 2010.This article explores fundamental differences between Robert Audi’s position on self-deception and mine. Although we both depart from a model of self-deception that is straightforwardly based on stereotypical interpersonal deception, we differ in how we do that. An important difference between us might be partly explained by a difference in how we understand the kind of deceiving that is most relevant to self-deception.
Tallahassee, Florida, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |