Thomas Müller opening the workshop

I was recently in the Netherlands (again!) for the Kickoff Workshop of the ERC funded Indeterminism Ltd. project’s Kickoff Workshop, organized by Thomas Müller and Jesse Mulder. Looking at the list of invited speakers, which, in addition to myself, included philosophers of science, a physicist, people working on decisions theories and philosophy of action etc., you might think that it was a rather peculiar event. However, the setup of the project is interdisciplinary, and I take it that the idea of the workshop was to bounce ideas around with people from different backgrounds. I’d say that this was a success in the end, as we had some lively, interesting discussions; I certainly learned a lot about the whole debate surrounding libertarian accounts of free will. Of course, I work on metaphysics, so I’m by no means an expert on all aspects of this debate, but I do find it very interesting.

My Q&A session (thanks to Jesse Mulder for the photo)

My own talk was called ‘On the Very Idea of Substance Causation’. You can find my slides and the abstract on the workshop website. Basically I was looking into Lowe’s account of substance causation in particular, which takes all causation to be substance causation. I ventured to suggest that a proponent of substance causation might have to follow Lowe in being a substance dualist as well. I was a little bit jetlagged having flown over from the US, so my presentation was perhaps a little sloppy (I was also the first speaker), but the idea seemed to get across well enough, since there was a good discussion afterwards. I have to admit though that the postdocs and PhD students in the project know this area much better than I do (and had some interesting insights about this).

A fancy clock at the venue

I did find it a bit difficult to follow some of the talks, given that I knew very little of the background literature. Having talked to Alexander Reutlinger, who gave a talk entitled ‘Interventionist Theories of Causation and Free Will’, but who doesn’t really specialize on this stuff either, it seems that this feeling may have been shared by others as well. However, the Q&A sessions were all good, and I feel that I got a decent understanding of the overall area.

Post-workshop drinks

I didn’t know any of the other speakers from before, with the exception of Alexander, but I had visited Utrecht before in October 2011, when I met some members of the research group. Utrecht is a rather nice city and it was great to meet some new people, as well as a couple of old acquaintances. My thanks to Thomas Müller and the whole research group for putting together a very nice workshop! It seems to me that The Netherlands is quickly becoming an important centre for philosophy in Europe, so I look forward to future events there. The project as a whole looks promising and I will keep an eye on their future events — there’s another four years left in the project. Make sure to check out Thomas Müller’s sister project as well, called ‘What is really possible?‘ — that one is in fact closer to my own research interests.

Some more photos that I took are available at my gallery.