Tim O'Connor Home

In metaphysics, I wrote a number of articles on the problem of understanding just what free will could possibly be, culminating in a book, The Metaphysics of Free Will, Oxford, 2000. The number of philosophers who thought this to be the final word on the matter dropped from 1 to 0 when I wrote "Freedom With a Human Face," Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 2005. And, despite my best intentions, I continue to get pulled into writing on this topic. Currently, I am at work on the challenges to belief in human freedom and moral responsibility that come from neuroscience and social and clinical psychology. 

The topic of free will is a nice gateway into thinking about a number of other issues in metaphysics. So, all along, I have also been working out views concerning properties, causation, the ontology of composite objects and their properties, truthmakers, essence, and modality. Some of these issues are explored in my writings on free will, and I touch on them to varying degrees in the first part of a just published book, Theism and Ultimate Explanation: The Necessary Shape of Contingency, Blackwell, 2008. I expect to write on several of these issues for some time to come.

In that sub-area of metaphysics known as philosophy of mind, I am concerned with reductionist vs. emergentist views of the mental and the relationship of consciousness and intentionality. I am currently trying to make sense out of an emergentist, property dualist view of conscious animals such as ourselves, with efforts along these lines in a number of articles co-authored with former and current students. 

I am also currently co-editing three volumes of new work on some of the above topics. The first is a large Companion to the Philosophy of Action. The other volumes engage the sciences through the 'reduction or emergence' theme: one of them is on the very idea of emergence and the other is an inter-disciplinary compendium of views on the status of empirical research on the human will.

Finally, in the philosophy of religion, I focus on the metaphysics of theism (especially God's relationship to time, concurrence in 'secondary' causation, and necessary existence), the problem of evil, the cosmological argument from contingency, and the 'fine-tuning' design argument, some of which come up in the second part of the new book mentioned above, in addition to several articles. I also think about the epistemology of religious belief. Lately I have been reviewing the recent, rather sketchy theories in evolutionary psychology about the origins of religious belief. (Not terribly impressed, I have to say, but I'm sure they'll get better.)

O.k., enough about such trivialities, here's the really important thing: nearly five years ago, in the absence of a controlling legal authority, I declared myself to be Philo-Pong Grand Champion, or the world's leading table tennis player among properly credentialed philosophers. I have since been receiving (though also largely evading) challenges to my title. Some day soon, I hope to organize a proper tournament to give you all a shot at the title. I'm thinking we'll do it in connection with a Central APA meeting in Chicago (my home turf). If you would be interested in participating, please let me know.

 

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