The Free Will Project, run by Santiago Amaya (Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Columbia) and Manuel Vargas (University of California, San Diego), recently received a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to fund research into free will, responsibility, and agency. The project is currently seeking applications for people interested in joining the midyear seminars or becoming postdoctoral fellows (the deadline is April 26).
To learn more about the project, I spoke to Amaya and Vargas. Amaya is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. He works on topics at the intersection of the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of action. Manuel Vargas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. He works on questions at the intersection of ethics and naturalistic conceptions of human agency, as well as topics in Latin American and Latinx philosophy.
It was recently reported that you both won a $1.2 million grant for a Free Will Project that will be located in Colombia. Can you tell us a little more about the project?
This is a project that seeks to develop talent in Latin America and beyond, and along the way, create the conditions for future collaborations among early career philosophers throughout the Americas. We believe there is untapped potential for high-level work on free will, agency, and responsibility in Latin America. And we believe there is much that philosophers from North and Latin American can learn from each other, if they sit together in a classroom rubbing shoulders as peers.
The centerpiece of the project is a series of midyear seminars on the metaphysical, the psychological, and the normative aspects of free will. Each seminar will take place in beautiful Bogotá. The idea is to give participants the resources and conditions to spend 3 weeks getting to know each other, thinking deeply and debating intensely about free will, under the guidance of some of the leading figures in the world working on these topics. These seminars will be topped off with a program of awards or prize competitions that will function year round.
There are some other cool bells and whistles: we’ll have 2 two-year postdoctoral fellowships, and visitors to UC San Diego. The basic upshot throughout, though, is that we want to seed the next generation of scholars to build active research programs in this area. In doing so, we suspect they will grow the discussion in interesting new ways.
We are in the process of building our new website, but details of the seminars can be found here:
https://mindandaction.uniandes.edu.co/index.php/midyear-seminars
The deadline for applicants is coming up soon—April 26th—so please apply!
“Free Will” is an important topic, given that so much (legal liability, for instance) hinges on it. What approach will the project take towards studying it, agency, and responsibility?
All of them! We can’t do everything, of course, but we’re going to try to get some pretty comprehensive coverage of some of the most important and dynamic work in philosophy and beyond. Over the past 40 years, work on free will has come to function as a place where many otherwise distinct philosophical connections feed into each other. We expect to build on traditional philosophical work. We also expect robust connections to more applied areas—the law, experimental work, neuroscience, and beyond.
Traditionally, the free will problem has been raised in connection with the thesis of determinism. That’s hardly the only interesting challenge to free will, though. There is a lot we still need to know about the psychology of free agents and how that psychology interacts with the social realities that we face today. There are, in other words, many problems of free will and we’re hoping project participants will identify and develop exciting new approaches to some of these problems.
Without giving too much away, can you sketch out the connections with the applied areas (mentioned above) that you would like the seminar to make?
Free will becomes a problem once we begin wondering where the source of our actions lies. The thesis of determinism is one way of bringing up these doubts. But there are also questions about the nature of our personal identity and the role that luck plays in our lives that bring up these concerns and that can be raised independently of whether our future is deterministically caused by our past.
Another set of problems arises once we ask why we care about free will. Plausibly, free will matters to us, at least in part, because we care about living a life informed by a conception of what is good, fun, lovable, etc. that can survive some scrutiny. But living such a life requires having certain psychological abilities, whose exercise clearly does not come easy to us. Imagining alternative courses of action is sometimes hard; deliberating well is tricky; sticking to one’s decisions is often effortful. Agents, on other hand, must do some of this well enough some of the time to be free.
A final set of issues come up once we start thinking about how freedom and our conceptions of it shape our communal lives. There are, obviously, concerns about the allocation of social benefits and burdens. But beyond this, there is also a set of questions regarding how much our interpersonal relations are shaped and ought to be shaped by a conception of each other as free agents.
These are some of the areas where we hope the seminars take us. To make this happen, we have invited a group of faculty that has been working on these issues and have plenty of interesting and novel things to say about them. So far, we have confirmed the faculty who will be part of our first seminar on the metaphysics of free will. But we will make more announcements regarding our other seminars soon!
You both have a background in moral psychology. What questions have you both studied within this field, and how have they influenced your work on the question of free will?
Manuel: I got into free will by having terrific teachers who couldn’t disagree with each other more about the nature and stakes of the problem. This eventually led me down the path of lots of thinking about methodological issues in free will and philosophy more generally. My interest in moral psychology was mostly a product of the experience I kept having of interesting things when I talked to people in the social sciences, and then wondering how that stuff fit with the things we talked about in the philosophy of action. These days, I tend to think there are lots of different stakes in talk about free will, and that a careful way to proceed involves clarity about what kind of role one is hoping an account of free will is to perform, and what sorts of things one hopes it explains. Moral psychological issues matter for some of those roles, but not others.
Santiago: For the longest time I’ve been obsessed with things that don’t work the way they should (or the way we think they should). My work in philosophy of action, for instance, has mostly focused on mistakes. That is, roughly, how I approach the question of free will. I try to identify first when is it that we fail miserably at acting freely and why we fail. Based on that, I ask what possibilities (if any) we have of acting freely and what kind of freedom we can realistically dream about having.
What outcomes would you like to see coming out of the project?
We’d love it if some day someone writes a history of 21st century developments on free will that includes a footnote that remarks about the puzzling fact that a lot of the most interesting developments could be traced back to a group of scholars who got together in Bogotá over several years to hash things out and build a community of philosophical inquiry. But we’ll settle for world peace, if that’s easier.
The community we envision has genuine two way-exchanges: down from the North and up from the South. This needs to happen at conferences and workshops, in the journals where we publish, and in the syllabi of the courses we teach. Although some of these things will happen in the course of many years, we aspire to see some of these changes during the life of the project.
Ideally, at the end of the project, everyone involved in it should be able to name among her collaborators at least 3 philosophers working on a different part of the continent. If we succeed, there won’t be any groups where everyone can accurately pronounce the names of all their collaborators.
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