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15When Are We Self-Deceived?Humana Mente 5 (20). 2012.This article’s point of departure is a proto-analysis that I have suggested of entering self-deception in acquiring a belief and an associated set of jointly sufficient conditions for self-deception that I have proposed. Partly with the aim of fleshing out an important member of the proposed set of conditions, I provide a sketch of my view about how self-deception happens. I then return to the proposed set of jointly sufficient conditions and offer a pair of amendments.
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485Autonomous Agents: From Self Control to AutonomyOxford University Press. 1995.Autonomous Agents addresses the related topics of self-control and individual autonomy. "Self-control" is defined as the opposite of akrasia-weakness of will. The study of self-control seeks to understand the concept of its own terms, followed by an examination of its bearing on one's actions, beliefs, emotions, and personal values. It goes on to consider how a proper understanding of self-control and its manifestations can shed light on personal autonomy and autonomous behaviour. Perspicuous, o…Read more
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30Jonathan. Adler, Belief's Own Ethics.Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. Pp. 357. (review)Ethics 114 (1): 156-158. 2003.A book review of Jonathan Adler's Belief's Own Ethics.
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59Ordinary people think free will is a lack of constraint, not the presence of a soulConsciousness and Cognition 60 133-151. 2018.Four experiments supported the hypothesis that ordinary people understand free will as meaning unconstrained choice, not having a soul. People consistently rated free will as being high unless reduced by internal constraints (i.e., things that impaired people’s mental abilities to make choices) or external constraints (i.e., situations that hampered people’s abilities to choose and act as they desired). Scientific paradigms that have been argued to disprove free will were seen as reducing, but u…Read more
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62Diana and Ernie return: on Carolina Sartorio’s Causation and Free WillPhilosophical Studies 175 (6): 1525-1533. 2018.In the final chapter of her Causation and Free Will, Carolina Sartorio offers a novel reply to an original-design argument for the thesis that determinism is incompatible with free will and moral responsibility, an argument that resembles Alfred Mele’s zygote argument in Free Will and Luck. This article assesses the merits of her reply. It is concluded that Sartorio has more work to do if she is to lay this style of argument to rest.
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63Mele develops a view of paradigmatically free actions--including decisions--as indeterministically caused by their proximal causes. He mounts a masterful defense of this thesis that includes solutions to problems about luck and control widely discussed in the literature on free will and moral responsibility.
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75Two Libertarian Theories: or Why Event-causal Libertarians Should Prefer My Daring Libertarian View to Robert Kane's ViewRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 80 49-68. 2017.Libertarianism about free will is the conjunction of two theses: the existence of free will is incompatible with the truth of determinism, and at least some human beings sometimes exercise free will (or act freely, for short). 1 Some libertarian views feature agent causation, others maintain that free actions are uncaused, and yet others – event-causal libertarian views – reject all views of these two kinds and appeal to indeterministic causation by events and states. 2 This article explores the…Read more
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54Springs of Action: Understanding Intentional BehaviorOxford University Press. 2002.Tackling some central problems in the philosophy of action, Mele constructs an explanatory model for intentional behavior, locating the place and significance of such mental phenomena as beliefs, desires, reasons, and intentions in the etiology of intentional action. In the first part, Mele illuminates the connection between desire and action and defends detailed characterizations of irresistible desires and reasons for action. Mele argues for the viability of a causal approach to the explanatio…Read more
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391Irrationality: an essay on akrasia, self-deception, and self-controlOxford University Press. 1987.The author demonstrates that certain forms of irrationality - incontinent action and self-deception - which many philosophers have rejected as being logically or psychologically impossible, are indeed possible.
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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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79Contours 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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79Approaching 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.
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132Moral responsibility and agents' historiesPhilosophical Studies 142 (2). 2009.To what extent should an analysis of an agent’s being morally responsible for an action that he performed—especially a compatibilist analysis of this—be sensitive to the agent’s history? In this article, I give the issue a clearer focus than it tends to have in the literature, I lay some groundwork for an attempt to answer the question, and I motivate a partial but detailed answer.
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15Free Action, Moral Responsibility, and Alternative Possibilities: Frankfurt-style Cases RevisitedIn F. Castellani & J. Quitterer (eds.), Agency and Causation in the Human Sciences, Mentis Verlag. 2007.
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63Review of Robert Kane's The Significance of Free Will (review)Journal of Philosophy 95 (11): 581-584. 1998.
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26Mental CausationRevue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 185 (1): 105-106. 1995.Common sense and philosophical tradition agree that mind makes a difference. What we do depends not only on how our bodies are put together, but also on what we think. Explaining how mind can make a difference has proved challenging, however. Some have urged that the project faces an insurmountable dilemma: either we concede that mentalistic explanations of behavior have only a pragmatic standing or we abandon our conception of the physical domain as causally autonomous. Although each option has…Read more
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59Incontinent BeliefJournal of Philosophical Research 16 197-212. 1991.Brian McLaughlin, in “Incontinent Belief” (Journal of Philosophical Research 15 [1989-90], pp. 115-26), takes issue with my investigation, in lrrationality (Oxford University Press, 1987), of a doxastic analogue of akratic action. He deems what I term “strict akratic belief” philosophically uninteresting. In the present paper, I explain that this assessment rests on a serious confusion about the sort of possibility that is at issue in my chapter on the topic, correct a variety of misimpressions,…Read more
Tallahassee, Florida, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |