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Derk Pereboom

My research areas are free will and moral responsibility, philosophy of mind, history of modern philosophy, especially Kant, and philosophy of religion, and I teach courses in each of these areas.

My views on free will are developed in Living without Free Will (Cambridge 2001), Four Views on Free Will (Blackwell 2007), and in my articles on this issue. My overall position is that due to general facts about the nature of the universe, we lack the sort of free will required for moral responsibility – that is, for our deserving, in a fundamental sense, blame or punishment for immoral action, and credit or reward for morally right action. We would not be morally responsible in this sense if determinism were true, but also if indeterminism were true and the causes of our actions were exclusively events. For such indeterministic causal histories of actions would be as threatening to this sort of free will as deterministic histories are. However, it might be that if we were undetermined agent-causes – if we as substances had the power to cause decisions without being causally determined to cause them – we would then have this type of free will. But although our being undetermined agent causes has not been ruled out as a coherent possibility, it is not credible given our best physical theories. Thus I do not claim that our having the sort of free will required for moral responsibility is impossible. Nevertheless, since the only account on which we are likely to have this kind of free will is not credible given our best physical theories, we must take very seriously the prospect that we are in fact not free in the sense required for moral responsibility. At the same time, I contend that a conception of life without this type of free will would not be devastating to morality or to our sense of meaning in life, and in certain important respects it may even be beneficial.

The physicalist position I propose in philosophy of mind, which I first defended in a number of articles, is now set out in Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism (Oxford 2011). I begin by developing two responses to the knowledge and conceivability arguments against physicalism. The first exploits the open possibility that introspective representations fail to represent mental properties as they are in themselves; specifically, that introspection represents phenomenal properties as having certain characteristic qualitative natures, which these properties might actually lack. The second response draws on the proposal that currently unknown fundamental intrinsic properties provide categorical bases for known physical properties and also yield an account of consciousness. While there are non-physicalist versions of this position, some are amenable to physicalism. The book’s third theme is a defense of a nonreductive account of physicalism. The kind of nonreductivism endorsed departs from others in that it rejects all token identity claims for psychological and microphysical entities. The deepest relation between the mental and the microphysical is constitution, where this relation is not to be explicated by the notion of identity. In addition, mental properties are identical to higher-level structural or compositional properties, and in this respect the position represents a compromise with type-identity theories.

My work on Kant focuses on the powers he thinks the self has, and how by means of philosophical investigation we can come to know or form rational beliefs about the nature of those powers. These powers include the capacity to gain knowledge of the world of experience, the mental processing that underlies this capacity, and the power of transcendental freedom. Kant thinks that we can acquire knowledge of the first two powers by means of transcendental philosophy, and one of my aims is to provide an account of the methodology of this discipline. But Kant maintains that we cannot know we are transcendentally free; we can only form a practically rational belief that we have this power. Another goal of mine is to explain why Kant endorses this view, and, more generally, why he believes that our knowledge has such limitations.

Office telephone: (607)255-6825
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Address: 323 Goldwin Smith Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-3201

Curriculum Vitae: pdf

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