Dr Thomas Müller (Philosophy/Descartes Centre) has been awarded a prestigious research grant of 1.5 million euros by the European Research Council for his research proposal 'Indeterminism Ltd. An intervention on the free will debate'. Müller argues that the notions of indeterminism and intervention are the main blind spots of the debate on man's free will. In the next 5 years Müller will lay the conceptual foundations for a novel, rich notion of indeterminism-based free will.
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.
Müller's research line will approach this 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. Müller's research will 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; Müller's research will fill this lacuna.
Besides contributing to the philosophical free will debate and its broader public ramifications, this research line will interact with neuroscientific research and will open up prospects for future research in theoretical and in practical philosophy. Two post-doc researchers and a PhD candidate will be working on sub-projects in this ERC-funded programme.