Back to the Basics--Except for the Zombies

My deep gratitude to Thomas for his gracious invitation to blog for a month on Flickers.  I'm something of an oddity here--a senior but reputationally obscure philosopher whose free will publications are minor and few: one in Analysis back in 1990 and two in the presently dormant (though in its heyday in many ways ahead of its times) e-journal Sorites.  My most recent free will-related stuff is a series of reviews, most recently of Manuel Vargas's Building Better Beings and the late David Hodgson's Consciousness + Rationality = Free Will.  Much of my published work has been in the philosophy of time, and tends toward the empirical side of that issue.  (The forthcoming issue of Erkenntnis has one on special relativity and presentism, to blow what few horns are at my disposal.)

On the other hand I have many publications/presentations in pedagogy that refer to the free will debate.  That is because since the late 80s I have developed an introduction to philosophy that is entirely based on that issue.  That's right--an intro that starts on the first day about free will, and on the last day is still about free will.  My strategy as an intro is that introductory students need not just exposure to some hodgepodge of philosophical content, but real sustained work in the patient analysis of concepts that interconnect in grasping a very complex problem area, and all in an attempt to challenge their thinking skills.  I suppose lots of problems might be suitable for this approach, but free will had its hooks in me from the first time I tried it.  (I used identity in the first experimental iterations of the class; too dry for me and the students too.)

 

I've taught the free will-themed course now for over 25 years, at least 4 sections a year and as many as 6 when I taught two sections in summer.  It's changed immensely to say the least (and so I cannot recommend looking at my out-of-date pubs on this as anything like an accurate account of curriculum as currently taught).  Its ongoing advantage to me is that I can teach a 4/4 schedule and yet try to remain current in free will scholarship to inform my class; its ongoing advantage to my students is that they can feel that they are engaging material that is up to date and also relevant in their own lives as the free will problem intersects morality, law, science, religion, language, logic, and so on.  So they do get a survey of philosophy of sorts--through the back door of free will and all the various disciplines that relate to understanding the problem.  How wide-ranging may the topics be?  Well, as an example our first class (the second after the initial caveat class about content and curriculum) includes two things.  First, there is a discussion of how two concepts of dinosaurs emerged based on evidence--cold-blooded reptilian versus warm-blooded avian--and I suggest how this might be a model for understanding two different concepts of/stances on free will-- incompatibilism versus compatibiliism.   (I do not even use those terms at that early stage:  it's respectively Da and Db as possibly analogous to FWa and FWb (further explained in my next post); Flickerers here may evaluate further thus ordered  analogies of the cold- versus warm-bloodedness of both sets of concepts!)  Second, they take 15 minutes or so to write out what they think "free will" means, which I collect, assess as either "I" or "C" (I don't explain what the letters mean), return to them to keep, and which we use for various purposes later.  They are typically astonished when we later actually get to use those initial papers in better grasping what they were trying to say about free will earlier.  But this exercise also has given me a quarter century's data about what mostly freshwo/men think about free will off the top of their heads.  They are initially largely--around 60% or more I'd say--classic compatibilists (doing what they want, etc.), and surprisingly stably so over the years.

In my role as guest blogger I want in the beginning to ask Flickerers to imagine trying as I am  to present questions of free will to neophytes willing to engage a prolonged and fairly comprehensive investigation of the problem.  So my first ruminations will be about the nature of external forms of freedom (such as social and political and physical) compared with internal forms of free will as possibly stably, related concepts.  Then I wish to introduce some practical questions about the role of free will in criminal justice and how they are presently answered (or avoided).   I will then go beyond these practical questions to see what logically possible stances on the free will problem are available, which is a very basic question but one I think too easily sidestepped even here at Flickers by presuming certain levels of discursive expertise instead of taking a more direct and comprehensive approach to matters of terminology and nomenclature.  Finally I will use a thought-experiment inspired by an earlier thread here on Flickers--in terms of conceivable free will zombies--which will attempt to raise the prospects of pragmatism as a major player in resolving the free will problem, and perhaps best expressed as a form of or at least closely allied with revisionism.

That's my plan.  My posts will be longish because I have a lot to crunch into my non-leap February--but aren't preapologies sometimes warranted even if prepunishment isn't?  Again thanks to Thomas and an upfront thanks as well to Flickerers for their patience and the privilege of hearing me out.

Comments

[Eddy Nahmias]

Alan, that intro course sounds really interesting. Would you be willing to share a syllabus (here or by email)? I wonder if I taught one of your articles on teaching intro as single subject about a decade ago when, at FSU, I taught a course to the grad students on teaching philosophy. I look forward to your posts.

And I encourage people to check out your Philosophy Songs on your website!

[V. Alan White]

Thanks so much Eddy. Martin Benjamin generously used my Teaching Philosophy articles in his Michigan State seminar on teaching philosophy (which traveled as well to many campuses) for several years. (What an inspiration he was; listening to him was about as close to Socrates as I ever got!)

I'd be glad to email my syllabus to you or anyone--just click on my B&W smugshot above (generously and mercifully replaced by Thomas for one that made me look like Wittgenstein looking for a poker) and there's a mailto you can use on my UW bio page. I'll warn you that my syllabus is not day-to-day, and only contains a thumbnail curriculum and a justificatory bibliography. If there is sufficient interest in how the curriculum works in my course, I might take time to set it out in detail here on Flickers. I do have an incomplete text to go with the course, but honestly more than half of what I do is still only in my head. (Several years ago I compiled a complete audio MP3 record of an entire course (except for a neat determinism-is-not-fatalism presentation that I love--I forgot the recorder that day), but that would be way too tedious for anyone to endure, and my classes evolve semester-to-semester anyway.) If you follow what I talk about here this month, at least you'll get a strong sense of the major moves of the class, except for the zombies stuff late in the month. But I'll say this much about the general sequence for it:

(1) The practical place of FW in traditions of Western (US) law and how those have radically changed recently.

(2) Determinism (as plausibly reflected in matters of mental illness) as a threat to FWa (incompatibilism).

(3) The dilemma of determinism as (a) an interesting problem and (b) a conceptual management tool for the FWx problem.

(4) The positions on FWx via FWa incompatibilism, FWb compatibilism, and FWx skepticism and exemplary philosophers for each.

(5) How the various positions would work out in laws that took the various positions seriously.

I warn my students this is not an easy course, and though it may well be more difficult than my upper-division classes and lots of students frankly are not up to it, I have gotten much more positive feedback than negative over the years. Quite a few former students were inspired to go on into law, including one that I hired to do my divorce a few years ago!

And yeah, I've done satiric parodies about philosophy since the late 70s, including my latest last year about PFOs. It's almost a compulsion--maybe why I'm interested in FW!

[Gregg D. Caruso]

Alan, your intro course sounds very interesting. I may give something like that a try very soon. BTW, I enjoyed reading your bio (the one Thomas posted). As someone who teaches a 5/5 load I can relate!

Looking forward to your posts and nervous that I need to follow you.

[V. Alan White]

Gregg thank you so much. No one, but no one here on Flickers does such an incredible job of juggling teaching with lots of impressive professional work. If I had a hat, I'd be tipping it!

[Justin Caouette]

Alan, what a great idea for an intro course. I may try a similar model in the future! Thanks for sharing.

[Gregg D. Caruso]

That's way too kind Alan. I tip my hat right back at ya!