Imperfect Cognitions

It was a pleasure be invited to the “Conscious Will and the Unconscious Mind” workshop, held at the Department of Philosophy, University of Duisburg-Essen , on the 28th of June this year. Organised by Astrid Schomäcker and Neil Roughley , the workshop intended to explore whether influences like implicit biases present a threat to free, responsible agency and a series of related questions. The following is a summary of the talks by the three speakers. Sven Walter Osnabrück, Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück, began by outlining two opposing ideas about the role of science in the free will debate. Firstly: free will incompatible with a naturalistic view of world (a view that often crops up in popular science magazines and journals). Secondly: the question of what free will amounts to is a philosophical one, and so empirical science is not the appropriate disciplinary home for an investigation into free will. For Sven, neit...

I am Neil Levy, Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics . These days I work mainly in philosophy of psychology and mind and applied ethics. Find out more about my work here . This is a precis of " Am I Racist? Implicit Bias and the Ascription of Racism ," recently published in Philosophical Quarterly . Implicit bias has recently received a great deal of high quality attention from philosophers. Papers have probed their nature, how their effects can be countered and their implications for ethics and for epistemology. In moral philosophy, the question that has dominated has been whether agents are responsible for actions partially caused by them.  But little space has been given to the question of how we are to characterize agents who harbor them. The agent who is explicitly sexist is a misogynist. But what about the agent who is only implicitly sexist? I explore t...