Philosophy

My research focuses primarily on ancient philosophy of mind: how the soul is related to the body, whether it has any distinctive causal power of its own, and how its states can represent the world or have content.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THE LECTURE IS SCHEDULED FOR WEDNESDAY NOT TUESDAY!

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Here I give the basic motivation for an "actual-sequence" theory of moral responsibility, according to which an agent can be morally responsible even though he or she never had freedom to do otherwise.  Moral responsibility is a matter of how we walk down the path of life, not whether we have various paths open to us.

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Rob's longest running research interest is in naturalistic theories of mental content. He has a related interest in the connection between theories of mental content and the proper nonsemantic characterization of mental representations. In recent years, he has been writing about extended cognition and the extended mind, about mental causation, and about various metaphysical issues related to the special sciences.

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“learning to play the piano is learning to reason with your muscles”                                                                          --Jeremy Denk  

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A major source of scientific skepticism about free will is the belief (defended by neuroscientist Benjamin Libet, social psychologist Daniel Wegner, and others) that conscious decisions and intentions never play a role in producing corresponding actions.  I discuss two serious problems encountered by any attempt to justify this belief by appealing to existing neuroscientific data.

Caring for Autonomy: Becoming Self-Governing With Others' Help

John Christman

Professor of Philosophy, Political Science and Women's Studies

Penn State University

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