The CEU Department of Philosophy cordially invites you to a talk (as part of its Departmental Colloquium series) by Hanoch Ben-Yami (CEU) on Libet’s Confusions Tuesday, 3 March 2015, 5.30 PM, Zrinyi 14, Room 412 ABSTRACT I try to demonstrate a possible contribution of philosophy to the sciences by exposing conceptual confusions in Libet’s empirical work on free will. The elimination of these confusions show that his research failed to establish what he claimed it does. Libet measured patterns of electric potential in subjects’ brain while asking them to report when they became conscious of an urge or decision to perform a certain action. Relying on the results he concluded that the urge or decision does not affect action, and hence that we have no free will. However, his research relies on a false picture of what free action involves. Libet thought that free action should be caused by a mental event – an urge or decision – which is the cause of action. But this mechanical picture of the mental is not entailed from our criteria for classifying an action as voluntary, free, intentional and so on. An action is free if the agent would have done something else in the same circumstances had he been given a good reason for that, if he knew what he was doing, if he didn’t act under duress, and so on. Accordingly, Libet’s experiment was irrelevant to the question, whether the subjects acted out of their free will. And moreover, of course they acted freely: had they had a good reason to act earlier or later, say, they would have done so. Krisztina Biber Department of Philosophy Coordinator ------------------------------------------ Central European University Nador u. 9. | 1051 Budapest, Hungary Office: + 36.1.327.3806 | biberk(a)ceu.hu | www.ceu.hu