21/10/2013: Robert Kane on Acting “of One’s Own Free Will”: New Perspectives on an Ancient Philosophical Problem

Robert Kane (Ph. D. Yale University) is University Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy Emeritus and Professor of Law at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of seven books and more that seventy articles on the philosophy of mind, free will and action, ethics and value theory and philosophy of religion, inclu­ding Free Will and Values (1985), Through the Moral Maze (1994), The Significance of Free Will (Oxford, 1996), A Contem­pora­ry Introduction to Free Will (Oxford, 2005), Four Views of Free Will (co-authored with John Fischer, Derk Pereboom and Manuel Vargas, Black­well, 2007) and Ethics and the Quest for Wisdom (Cambridge, 2010). He is editor of The Ox­ford Handbook of Free Will (2002, 2nd edition, 2011), among other anthologies, and a multiple contri­bu­tor to the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. His lecture series, The Quest for Mea­ning: Va­lues, Ethics and the Modern Experience, appears in The Great Courses on Tape Series of The Teaching Company (Chantilly, Virginia). His book, The Significance of Free Will, was the first annual winner of the Robert W. Hamilton Faculty Book Award. His article, “The Modal Ontological Argument” (Mind, 1984), was selected by The Philosopher’s Annual as one of ten best of 1984. The recipient of fifteen major teaching awards at the University of Texas, including the President’s Excellence Award for teaching in the University’s Honors Program, he was named in 1995 one of the inaugural members of the Universi­ty’s Aca­demy of Distinguished Teachers. He is known internationally for his defense of a libertarian or incompatibilist view of free will (one that is incomaptible with determinism) and for his attempt to reconcile such a view with modern science.

This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Kane’s talk - 'Acting “of One’s Own Free Will”: New Perspectives on an Ancient Philosophical Problem' - at the Aristotelian Society on 21 October 2013. The recording was produced by Backdoor Broadcasting Company in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.