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PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS
BY DAVID HODGSON
http://users.tpg.com.au/raeda/
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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 now be
read on this website. A general account
of my views can be found in the article ‘A plain person’s free will’ (2005);
and 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 recently
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 ‘Almost free’.
Comments
on these articles can be sent to me at raeda@tpg.com.au
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2008 ‘The Conway-Kochen
“free will theorem” and unscientific determinism’, submitted for
publication.
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
‘Almost free’ in The Times Literary Supplement on 6 July, 2007.
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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