2024 Garven Lecture in Philosophy | Free Will, Felonies, and Phlogiston
Prof. Manuel Vargas & Ass. Prof. Hannah Tierney
5:00pm doors for a 5:30pm start.Some things seem vulnerable to scientific disproof. For example, the contemporary scientific community doesn’t rely on formerly important scientific concepts like phlogiston, luminiferous aether, or elan vital. After lots of effort, scientists concluded that those things don’t exist. Other ideas, though, seem less vulnerable to scientific disproof. For example, it seems unlikely that scientific discoveries will show that marriages, money, or felonies don’t exist. Is free will more like marriage, money, and felonies or is it more like phlogiston, luminiferous aether, or elan vital? Many prominent scientists have thought that free will is more like the latter case, that is, it is the kind of thing that can be (or even has been) disproven by science. This talk makes the case for the other view, that is, that free will has a substantial, but imperfect, degree of insulation against scientific attempts to disprove it. The explanation for why is bound up in the role free will plays in our social practices.
SPEAKERS
Manuel Vargas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California San Diego. He has written on free will, moral responsibility, topics in moral psychology, the philosophy of law, the history of philosophy in Latin America, and ethno-racial social identities. He is the author of Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (Oxford, 2013), which was awarded the American Philosophical Association’s biennial Book Prize, the forthcoming Mexican Philosophy (Oxford), and he is one of the authors of the widely used textbook Four Views on Free Will (Wiley-Blackwell 2007, second edition 2024). He has co-edited several volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology (Oxford, 2022), Rational and Social Agency: The Philosophy of Michael Bratman (2014), and The Latinx Philosophy Reader (Routledge, forthcoming). In addition to writing for popular publications in philosophy, he has been a frequent guest on radio programs and philosophy podcasts, including Philosophy Talk, Very Bad Wizards, the Kelly Corrigan Show, and others.
Hannah Tierney is an associate professor in the philosophy department at the University of California, Davis. She has broad philosophical interests, and writes mainly on issues of free will, moral responsibility, and personal identity.
The lecture will be followed by refreshments.
To be held on Campus at the .">span>. All welcome. chau-chak-wing-museum?share.
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Image: Photo by Xavier on Adobe iStock
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