The American Philosophical Association is pleased to announce Christian List (LMU Munich) has been awarded the 2020 Joseph B. Gittler Award for his book, Why Free Will Is Real (Harvard University Press).
The Joseph B. Gittler Award is given for an outstanding scholarly contribution in the field of the philosophy of one or more of the social sciences. This prize was established in 2007 with funds donated by the estate of Joseph B. Gittler.
From the selection committee: We were pleased to select Christian List’s Why Free Will Is Real as the recipient of the 2020 Joseph B. Gittler Award for its contributions to the philosophy of social science. List defends a “compatabilist libertarianism,” demonstrating how a deterministic account of human organisms, construed as physical systems, might be reconciled with the substantive kinds of choice, agency and self-control people must have if they are to be justly held responsible for their actions in moral and legal contexts. In accessible prose, List weaves together work on mental causation, counterfactual dependency, and psychological explanation to sketch an attractive account of free will that might be used to unify the diverse perspectives of humanists and social scientists. The resulting synthesis is remarkable for both its clarity and practical significance.
Christian List is Professor of Philosophy and Decision Theory at LMU Munich and Co-Director of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, with effect from January 2021. He was previously Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at the London School of Economics, with which he retains a connection. He works at the intersection of philosophy, economics, and political science, with a particular focus on individual and collective decision-making and the nature of intentional agency. He was awarded the 2010 Social Choice and Welfare Prize (jointly with Franz Dietrich) for his work on judgment aggregation. In recent years, a growing part of his work has addressed metaphysical questions, e.g., about free will, causation, probability, and the relationship between “micro” and “macro” levels of analysis in the human and social sciences. His previous book was Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents (with Philip Pettit, Oxford University Press 2011). More information and downloadable papers can be found on his webpage at: http://christianlist.net
