Indeterminism Ltd.

Workshop with Helen Beebee: “Causality and Laws”
University of Konstanz, Germany
4. – 5.11.2015

A mini-workshop on Freedom in Action will be held on Monday the 8th of June in Utrecht, in the Sweelinckzaal of Drift 21 from 10:00 to 17:00. The workshop will focus on topics related to Niels van Miltenburg’s doctoral thesis also entitled “Freedom in Action” that will be publically defended on the next day.

The conference “Real Possibilities, Indeterminism and Free Will” will take place at the University of Konstanz, Germany on 18-21 March 2015.

The conference will mark the final phases of two ongoing projects at the University of Konstanz:

What is really possible? Philosophical explorations in branching-history based real modality
funded by a VIDI grant of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO),

and

Indeterminism Ltd. An intervention on the free will debate
funded by a Starting Grant of the European Research Council (ERC).

The first project centers on formal and metaphysical aspects of real possibilities for the future. The second project centers on the role that the open future can play for understanding agency in our indeterministic world. The goal of this conference is to provide a forum for discussing those two lines of research and their intersection.

How can anything at all happen in an indeterministic world? And how can that which happens, be something specific? In an indeterministic world (like ours, arguably), it is not determined what will happen — but how can that which happens, become determinate then? Can we learn about this problem by considering agency, or can we sharpen our understanding of agency by considering this problem? Is it fruitful to approach the problem from the point of view of things actualizing their potentialities (their dispositions and powers), or should we use some framework of indeterminstic event causation, or some other framework?

The workshop will take place on Thursday/Friday, 12/13 January 2012. At the workshop, eight international speakers will be presenting their work in a variety of areas, ranging from freedom and the philosophy of action to determinism, metaphysics, and philosophy of science.