CFA: New Orleans Workshop on Agency and Responsibility

This
is a call for abstracts for the second biennial New Orleans Workshop on
Agency and Responsibility (NOWAR), to be held in New Orleans, LA at the
Intercontinental
Hotel on November 7-9, 2013.  Abstracts are welcome on any topic having
to do with agency and/or responsibility.  Perspectives beyond just those
from moral philosophy (e.g., psychology, legal theory, neuroscience,
economics, metaphysics, and more) are welcome. 
(To see more about the workshop’s general aims and other details, follow
this link: https://murphy.tulane.edu/events/center-conferences-symposia/1888.php.) 
 
Abstracts
should be no more than 3 double-spaced pages and are due no later than
March 1, 2013.  They do NOT need to be prepared for blind review. 
Please send
abstracts by e-mail to David Shoemaker: dshoemak@tulane.edu
A program committee will evaluate submissions and make decisions by
early May.  The
authors of all accepted abstracts will be expected to provide drafts of
their essays for distribution to NOWAR attendees four weeks prior to the
workshop, present their ideas at the workshop, and then commit the
final versions of their essays (subject to external
review) to the second volume of Oxford Studies on Agency and Responsibility
(which is expected to be published in early 2015).  Those who presented
at the first NOWAR are ineligible to present at the second.
 
NOWAR
is a biennial workshop featuring the presentation of sophisticated
original research
on issues roughly captured under the label “agency and responsibility.” 
This general area involves investigation of such questions as: What
does it mean to be an agent?  How (if at all) does the nature of
personhood and personal identity across time bear on
questions of agency?  What is the nature of, and relation between, moral
and criminal responsibility?  What is the relation between
responsibility and the metaphysical issues of determinism and free
will?  What do various psychological disorders (autism, psychopathy,
cognitive disabilities) tell us about agency and responsibility?  What
is involved in the development of moral agency?  What is the will,
willpower, and weakness (or strength) of will?  What do the results from
neuroscience imply (if anything) for our questions
about agency and responsibility?  What is the nature of autonomy and how
is it related to agency and responsibility?
 
Work
in agency and responsibility, while more or less having a home base in
the world of
moral philosophy, draws from a host of cross-disciplinary sources,
including moral psychology, psychology proper (experimental,
developmental, abnormal, etc.), philosophy of psychology, philosophy of
law, legal theory, metaphysics, neuroscience, neuroethics,
political philosophy, and more.  It is unified by its focus on who we
are as deliberators and (inter)actors, embodied practical agents
negotiating (sometimes unsuccessfully) a world of moral and legal norms.
 
The
workshop, sponsored by the generous support of the Murphy Institute at
Tulane University,
will involve 11 presentations (including keynote speakers), from which
will be drawn the papers contributing to the OUP book series,
Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility.
 
Keynote Speakers, 2013
 
John Martin Fischer,
Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Riverside
 
Susan Wolf,
Edna J. Koury Professor of Philosophy, University of North Carolina

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