It's the first of the month yet again--which means it's time to thank last month's Featured Author (Joshua Sheperd) for doing an outstanding job stoking the flames of discourse here at Flickers of Freedom. It's always illustrative to see what my fellow researchers are working on these days. It's also nice to see people taking their work on action theory in different directions--from the metaphysics of determinism to the relationship (or lack thereof) between different forms of consciousness and different kinds of agency. So, thanks again to Joshua for his time and energy.
That said, it's now time to pass the torch to this month's Featured Author--Marcus Arvan. Arvan is currently finishing up a book manuscript entitled Reinventing the Metaphysics of Morals: A New Moral and Political Theory in which he provides an argument for revising all of Kant’s formulations of the Categorical Imperative, unifies the revised formulas, and use them to defend a new theory of rightness called “Rightness as Fairness”, consisting of one deontological principle (principle of negative fairness), one consequentialist principle (principle of positive fairness), and a principle of virtue – unifying three dominant strands of moral philosophy into a single coherent whole.
Arvan is also engaged in developing a systematic theory of nonideal justice, “Nonideal Justice as Nonideal Fairness”, and defending a radical reconceptualization of human rights theory and practice. Finally, in metaphysics and the philosophy of physics, he has defended a new theory of reality – the Peer-to-Peer Simulation Theory – as a unified explanation of quantum phenomena, and he uses the model to defend a new theory of free will, Libertarian Compatibilism, according to which libertarian free will in a higher reference-frame generates the illusion of physical causal closure in our reference frame at the level of quantum wave-function collapse.
In short, Arvan has a lot of ambitious and interesting projects underway. So, it will be fun having him on Flickers of Freedom this month to share his ideas. Please join me in welcoming him!
Finally, here is the line up for the Featured Author series through the end of the year (with more additions to come soon for 2015):
September: Matt King
October: Justin Coates
November: Charles Hermes
December: Peter Tse
As always, thanks to everyone for helping to make this blog such a great online forum for discussing free will and related issues! Hopefully, everyone (inclding me) can try to find more time to participate in the discussion threads in the weeks and months ahead. Try not to miss out on the fun. We have a rare community here at Flickers, so we shouldn't take it for granted!
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