A talk by Timothy O’Connor, Mahlon Powell Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Cognitive Science, Indiana University, Bloomington.
Featured topic: Human motivation, awareness, choice and action are studied by psychology and now neuroscience. Some allege that these sciences have ‘disproved’ the concept of free will that philosophers have discussed since antiquity. More plausibly, they are helping us to understand its scope and limits. I will survey a number of degreed ‘freedom factors’ being investigated empirically and bring out the challenges of organizing them into a cohesive framework that might ‘measure free will.’ As we will see, meeting these challenges requires collaboration between philosophy and the human sciences.
