CfP Agency and Free Will in an Indeterministic World: New Perspectives from Philosophy, Biology and Neuroscience
Topical Collection in Synthese. An International Journal for Epistemology, Methodology and Philosophy of Science
Guest Editor: Anne Sophie Meincke, University of Vienna
The philosophical debate about free will has long been concerned with whether free will is compatible with the deterministic laws of classical physics. The truth of universal determinism is commonly taken for granted also by those who judge free will to be incompatible with determinism and conclude from this that free will is illusory. Indeed, scepticism about free will is on the rise, fuelled additionally by claims from biology and neuroscience that our genes determine who we are and how we behave, or that we are passive bystanders to the decisions made by our brains. Given this intellectual landscape, it is not surprising that libertarian conceptions of free will have remained a minority position to date. Turning its back on determinism and famously having been accused by Peter F. Strawson of subscribing to an ‘obscure and panicky metaphysics’, libertarianism about free will is still widely dismissed as inconsistent with a scientific worldview.
This topical collection aims to take a fresh look at libertarianism and, more broadly, to explore the prospects for robust notions of agency and free will under indeterminism that do not run counter to science but may even be scientifically grounded. Could there be something like scientific libertarianism? What would it entail? Addressing these questions is timely, given the mounting evidence that our world is indeed indeterministic. As far as physics is concerned, the indeterminacy of quantum behaviour poses a well-known threat to the idea of universal determinism. But also recent developments in biology, such as epigenetics, the noticeable shift from gene-centred to organism-centred theories of evolution and the rediscovery of organisms as agents, challenge biological versions of determinism, especially genetic determinism. At the same time, neuroscientists, such as Björn Brembs, Kevin Mitchell and Peter U. Tse, are disputing the popular narrative that neuroscience has disproved free will, instead providing evidence for indeterministic neural mechanisms that support libertarian free will.
This call for papers invites philosophers (working, e.g., in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind and action and the philosophy of biology) as well as philosophically-interested biologists and neuroscientists to present their visions of what it means to be an agent with free will in an indeterministic world. A scientifically grounded account of an ontologically robust, libertarian notion of free will can only be achieved through a collaborative effort across disciplines. Therefore, this topical collection brings together cutting-edge work from all three perspectives in the hope of fostering a productive interdisciplinary dialogue that breaks new ground in the understanding of free will.
The topical collection is associated with the interdisciplinary conference “Free Will: New Perspectives from Philosophy, Biology and Neuroscience”, taking place at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria, on 11 and 12 June 2025.
The complete text of the CfP, including a list of appropriate topics for submission, is available here.
The deadline for submissions is 15th October 2025.
I am looking forward to your submissions.