Whitehead Lectures: Lucy Allais (Johns Hopkins/Witwatersrand), "Human Free Agency: A Sketch"

Abstract: My aim in these lectures is to present parts of the account of human free agency that I am currently working on. The idea of the bigger project is to sketch an account of human free agency that brings together its metaphysical, rational/moral, and political aspects. In these two lectures I sketch the first two parts of this picture. In the first lecture I present an account of agency as involving whole-part causal capacities that are engaged in a way that is genuinely open at the time at which the agent acts, but that does not involve agents breaking laws governing their parts, or doing something that has no causal antecedents. In the second lecture I present an account of the rational capacities that make sense of the possibility of holding agents accountable for their actions. I present an account of constraints on acting for reasons that are based in what it is to act for reasons.

May 1, Lecture I: "An Antinomy of Agency"

May 2, Lecture II: "Rational Agency”