Michael McKenna is the Keith Lehrer Chair of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom at the University of Arizona. He writes primarily on the topics of free will and moral responsibility. He also works on related issues in ethics, metaphysics, action theory, and moral psychology. He is Guest Editor of this issue of Social Philosophy and Policy.
Santiago Amaya is Associate Professor at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. His main research interests are in the philosophy of action and moral psychology. He has published articles on action slips, the nature of intentions, and moral responsibility in different venues, including Noûs, Philosophical Studies, and Philosophy Compass. Santiago holds a PhD in Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology from Washington University in St. Louis. After obtaining his PhD he was a Volkswagen Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain.
Macalester Bell is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bryn Mawr College. She has published on a range of topics in ethics and moral psychology in journals such as American Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Quarterly, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. She is the author of Hard Feelings: The Moral Psychology of Contempt (2013).
Justin A. Capes is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Flagler College, specializing in ethics and metaphysics. He finds himself irresistibly drawn to working on the problem of free will in particular. (The irony of this isn’t lost on him.) He has also published articles on blameworthiness and, most recently, the philosophy of death, in journals including Philosophical Studies, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Papers, and Erkenntnis.
Christopher Evan Franklin is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Grove City College. His primary research is in ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of action and mind. He is author of A Minimal Libertarianism: Free Will and the Promise of Reduction (2018), which explores the tenability of developing a libertarian model of free will and moral responsibility within a framework that seeks to reduce the causal role of the agent to the causal role of his psychology. His published articles have appeared in Mind, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Criminal Law and Philosophy, and others.
Meghan Griffith is Professor of Philosophy at Davidson College. She is a coeditor of the Routledge Companion to Free Will (2017), and the author of Free Will: The Basics (2013), as well as a number of journal articles and book chapters. She is interested in the metaphysics of agency, especially whether agency is irreducible (to sequences of mental states). Her research also focuses on moral responsibility and on some topics within the philosophy of action. She recently participated in the Philosophy and Science of Self-Control Project, directed by Alfred Mele at Florida State University with funding from the John Templeton Foundation. Her project examines responsibility for self-control failures in children. She is currently working to incorporate this examination into a larger project on the development of morally responsible agency. She is particularly interested in the role that narrative capacities play in this development.
Robert Kane is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus and Professor of Law at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of seven books on mind and action, free will and moral responsibility, and ethics and values, including Free Will and Values (1985), Through the Moral Maze: Searching for Absolute Values in a Pluralistic World (1993), The Significance of Free Will (1996), Ethics and the Quest for Wisdom (2010), and an audio lecture series in the Great Lectures on Tape Series, entitled The Quest for Meaning: Values, Ethics and the Modern Experience. He is editor of The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (1st edition, 2002, 2nd, 2011), among several other anthologies, and author of over eighty articles. His article “The Modal Ontological Argument” (Mind, 1984) was named one of the ten best of the year by the Philosopher’s Annual; and his book, The Significance of Free Will was the first annual winner of the Hamilton Faculty Book Award. He is the recipient of fifteen major awards for teaching excellence at the University of Texas, and in 1995 was named an inaugural member of the University’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers.
Kelly McCormick is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas Christian University. Her research focuses on free will, moral responsibility, and blame, with particular interest in methodological questions about the motivation for eliminativism and revisionism, and the justification of our responsibility-related attitudes and practices. She is also interested in the nature and norms of blame, and basic desert of blame. Her published work has appeared in several issues of Philosophical Studies, as well as Journal of Value Inquiry, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, Journal of Criminal Justice Ethics, the Wiley Companion to Free Will, and the Routledge Companion to Free Will (2017).
Kristin M. Mickelson received her PhD from the University of Colorado at Boulder (2012) and is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Gothenburg Responsibility Project and the Department of Linguistics, Philosophy, and Theory of Science at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Her research is broadly focused on the metaphysics of a meaningful life, especially metaphysical problems related to free will and autonomy, such as issues related to mental causation, personal identity, the laws of nature, and moral responsibility. She has published in Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, and Philosophical Studies, and has invited chapters in edited volumes such as the Routledge Companion to Free Will (2017).
Dana Kay Nelkin is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, and an Affiliate Professor at the University of San Diego School of Law. Her areas of research include moral psychology, ethics, bioethics, and philosophy of law. She is the author of Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility (2011), and a number of articles on a variety of topics, including self-deception, friendship, the lottery paradox, psychopathy, forgiveness, and praise and blame. She is also a coeditor of the Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility (forthcoming) and The Ethics and Law of Omissions (2017). In addition, she is a member of an interdisciplinary collaboration of philosophers and psychologists, the Moral Judgements Project, which brings together normative and descriptive inquiries about the use of moral principles such as the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing and the Doctrine of Double Effect. She is also a member of the advisory board of the UC San Diego Institute for Practical Ethics.
Mirja Pérez de Calleja is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Columbia and in the LATAM Free Will, Agency, and Responsibility Project. She previously held a postdoctoral position in Philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Her area of specialization is the problem of free will in philosophy of action and metaphysics. She also has research interests in philosophy of education and developmental psychology, especially in connection with autonomy. She is the author of a prize-winning article in Philosophical Explorations (2014), and has several other forthcoming publications. Her current work focuses on the luck problem in the free will literature, and on an interdisciplinary understanding of indoctrination.
Michael Robinson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Chapman University. His primary research interests concern the ethics and metaphysics of human agency—particularly free will and moral responsibility, mental action, intentional action, moral obligation, blame, and punishment. Much of his work has focused on debates surrounding the requirements for free will and moral responsibility and whether we (are able to) satisfy them. He has been especially interested in defending the view that ability to do otherwise is a necessary condition for moral responsibility. Recently, he has been spending more time thinking about the nature of desert and the role it plays in moral responsibility. His work has appeared in Philosophical Studies, Erkenntnis, Utilitas, and Philosophia. He regularly teaches courses on free will and moral responsibility, ethics, medical ethics, business ethics, and logic. Prior to Chapman, he held positions at Florida State University, Grand Valley State University, and Washington and Jefferson College.
Chandra Sripada is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan with a joint appointment in the Department of Psychiatry and the Department of Philosophy. He works on issues of mind and agency that lie at the intersection of philosophy and the behavioral and brain sciences. In the Department of Psychiatry he studies brain mechanisms of attention and self-control, and in the Department of Philosophy he tries to understand how emerging results from the sciences impact our picture of ourselves as free and rational agents. Recent papers appear in leading journals in philosophy such as Mind and Nous, and in the sciences such as PNAS and Journal of Neuroscience.
