REASONABLE FREE WILL
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PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS
BY DAVID HODGSON
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I am a Judge of Appeal of the Supreme Court of New South
Wales, Australia. I am also deeply
interested in philosophy. I've published
two philosophical books through Oxford University Press (Consequences of
Utilitarianism 1967 and The Mind Matters 1991), and many articles on
philosophical topics including consciousness, probability and plausible
reasoning. In recent years, my main
philosophical interest has been free will.
In addition to my 1991 book, I have published articles on this topic,
made contributions to a book on free will edited by the neuroscientist Benjamin
Libet and others (The Volitional Brain) and to
two books on free will edited by the philosopher Robert Kane (Free Will
in Blackwell Readings in Philosophy, and Oxford Handbook of Free Will),
and written the entry on free will for the Macmillan Encyclopedia
of Cognitive Science. I contributed
a target article ‘A plain person’s free will’ for a 2005 issue of Journal
of Consciousness Studies, which also contained several commentaries on this
article (including commentaries by the philosophers Robert Kane and J. J. C.
Smart and the physicist Henry Stapp) and my response
to these commentaries.
I support the view that we really do have a degree of free
will and ultimate responsibility for our actions. This is a minority view among scientists and
scientifically-oriented philosophers, many of whom claim that our characters
and actions are wholly and inevitably determined by our genes and environment
(nature, nurture and circumstances); but I believe there are strong reasons
supporting my view that have generally been overlooked, and that there are good
answers to the objections raised to this view.
I think it is important that these reasons and answers become more
widely appreciated.
I set out below the references to my main publications that
relate to free will. Many of the
articles can be read on this website.
The fullest statement of what I believe to be my most significant
original argument (my ‘gestalt argument’) is in the article ‘Three tricks of
consciousness’ (2002). I have distilled
my main arguments in support of free will into a brief article ‘Why I (still)
believe in free will and responsibility’, an edited version of which was
published in The Times Literary Supplement on 6 July, 2007 under the
title ‘Partly free’.
I recently completed a book on free will which builds on the
ideas I have been developing since 1991.
It is called Rationality +
Consciousness = Free Will, and it is to be published in November 2011 by
Oxford University Press. See here and here.
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PUBLICATIONS
2011 Rationality + Consciousness = Free Will (New York:
Oxford University Press) (to be published in November)
2010 ‘In defence of voluntariness’; in Toepel,
F. (ed.) (2010), Free Will in Criminal Law and Procedure (Franz Steiner Verlag).
2009 ‘Criminal responsibility, free will, and neuroscience’; in
Murphy, Ellis and O’Connor (eds.) (2009), Downward Causation and the
Neurobiology of Free Will (Berlin:
Springer).
2009 ‘Limits of physicalism’; in Mchenry,
L. (ed.) (2009), Science and the Pursuit of Wisdom (Ontos
Verlag).
2008 ‘The Conway-Kochen “free will theorem” and unscientific determinism’,
partly incorporated in Rationality + Consciousness
= Free Will
(2011).
2008 ‘The knowledge
argument: a response to Elizabeth Schier’, Journal
of Consciousness Studies 15(4), 112-115.
2008 ‘A role for consciousness’,
Philosophy Now 65, 22-24.
2007
‘Making our own luck’,
Ratio 20, 278-292.
2007
‘Why I (still) believe in
free will and responsibility’, edited version published under the title
‘Partly free’ in The Times Literary Supplement on 6 July, 2007.
2007 Letter responding to
comments on Dawkins article, Quadrant 439, 5-6
2007 ‘Dawkins and the
morality of the Bible’, Quadrant 436, 38-43.
2005
‘Responsibility
and good reasons’, Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 2.2, 471-483.
2005
'Goodbye to qualia and all that' , Journal of Consciousness
Studies 12(2), 84-88.
2005 ‘Response to
commentators’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 12(1), 76-95.
2005
‘A plain person’s free
will’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 12(1), 1-19.
2003 ‘Free will’, Macmillan Encyclopedia of
Cognitive Science.
2002
‘Three tricks of
consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 9(12), 65-88.
2002 Review of Searle, John R. (2001), Rationality in Action (Cambridge
MA: MIT), Journal of Consciousness Studies 9(2), 92-4.
2002
‘Quantum physics,
consciousness, and free will’; in Kane, R. (ed.) (2002), Oxford
Handbook of Free Will (New York:
Oxford University Press).
2001
‘Constraint,
empowerment and guidance: a conjectural classification of laws of nature’, Philosophy 76, 341-70.
2000
‘Guilty mind or guilty
brain: criminal responsibility in the
age of neuroscience’, The
Australian Law Journal 74, 661-80.
1999
‘Hume’s mistake’; in Libet, B., Freeman, A., and Sutherland, K. (eds) (1999), The
Volitional Brain (Thorverton: Imprint Academic), and republished in part in
Kane, R. (ed.) (2002), Free Will (Malden MA: Blackwell).
1998 ‘Folk psychology, science, and the
criminal law’; in Hameroff, Scott and Kaszniak (1998) Toward a Science of Consciousness II
(Cambridge MA: MIT).
1996 ‘Nonlocality, local
indeterminism, and consciousness’, Ratio 9, 1-22
1996 ‘The easy problems ain’t so easy’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 3(1), 69-75.
1995 ‘What zombies can’t do’,
Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(4), 360-1.
1995 ‘Probability: the logic of the law - a response’, Oxford
Journal of Legal Studies 14, 51-68.
1994 ‘Why Searle hasn’t rediscovered
the mind’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 1(2), 264-74.
1994 ‘Neuroscience and folk-psychology - an
overview’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 1(2), 205-16.
1991 The Mind Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
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