“Indeterminsm Ltd.” is a research group in philosophy funded by an ERC Starting Grant of the European Research Council. The project is led by Thomas Müller and is hosted by the Department of Philosophy of the University of Konstanz.
For the sister project, “What is really possible?”, see here.
Description of research
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.
“Indeterminism, Ltd.” will approach that 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; we aim to 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; we will fill this lacuna. Overall, our aim is to lay the conceptual foundations for and work out the details of a novel, rich notion of indeterminism-based free will.
