Dear all, This Thursday, Verena Wagner from the University of Konstanz will be talking at the Serious Metaphysics Group on "Glitterfree Freedom" (abstract below).
We will be meeting from 1 to 2.30pm in the Faculty Board Room. All welcome. Feel free to bring your lunch. Best, Dan. - Abstract. *Glitter-free Freedom* is what I'm calling my attempt to argue against the widespread expectation that free will can be proposed as a solution for all our problems with regard to action, moral responsibility, praise- and blameworthiness, punishment, rationality, human dignity, personhood, sanity, akrasia and many more issues. This is the "glitter" I want to get rid of. In this talk, I will ask what might be left of freedom once we removed its "glittery" ornament and what we should expect a glitterfree account of freedom to do. I will argue that freedom of action, unlike freedom of the will, is well equipped for covering all the relevant phenomena. Specifically, my account correctly analyses the paradigm examples of unfree agents that dominate the debate: the hold-up victim, the addict, the compulsive handwasher and the paranoid schizophrenic. I will oppose the standard strategy to look for different sorts of freedom (of action, will, belief) and will instead argue that each of the aforementioned cases shares a specific structure that can be captured by my unified account. For this, it is important to see a) that freedom is a negative notion, and b) that attempts to define freedom positively will very likely end up in tinsel and glitter. -- Daniel Williams PhD Candidate in Philosophy Email: [email protected] Trinity Hall, Cambridge _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
