INDETERMINISMLTD · Indeterminism Ltd.:An intervention on the free will debate

What is the place of man in nature? How do our everyday conceptions of ourselves and the things around us connect with a scientific picture of the world? These questions loom large in the background of the free will debate. We understand ourselves as free agents facing an open future – but is this a tenable picture vis-à-vis scientific findings? Conceptual as well as empirical neuroscientific arguments have recently led to a heated debate on free will that has reached well beyond the academic sphere.My research line will approach this debate from a theoretical perspective, using results from philosophical logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of science. From that perspective, the main blind spots of the free will debate concern the notions of determinism vs. indeterminism and intervention. Despite its acknowledged centrality for the debate, the notion of indeterminism is insufficiently developed; my research will show how a notion of limited indeterminism can help to dispel many worries about the role of an open future for free will. The notion of intervention, which is prominent in research on causality, is almost completely absent from the free will debate; my research will fill this lacuna. Overall, my aim is to lay the conceptual foundations for and work out the details of a novel, rich notion of indeterminism-based free will.Three sub-projects involving the PI, two post-doc researchers and a Ph.D. candidate will work towards this aim in a modular fashion. Besides contributing to the philosophical free will debate and its broader public ramifications, my research line will interact with neuroscientific research and will open up prospects for future research in theoretical and in practical philosophy.