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. I have written recently 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 another 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 students. 

Over the last year, I co-edited three volumes of new work on some of the above topics.  A Companion to the Philosophy of Action, Emergence in Science and Philosophy, and an inter-disciplinary compendium of views on the status of empirical research on the human will, titled Downward Causation and the Neurobiology of Free Will. (Don't blame me -- the scientists liked the title.)

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 Theism and Ultimate Explanation, in addition to several articles. I also think about the epistemology of religious belief. An author-meets-critics symposium on Theism will appear soon in Philosophia Christi. In response to several reviews, I am also writing a paper that refines and extends the book's argument for the claim that contingent existence is  an appropriate and feasible target for explanation. In the near future, I anticipate weighing in on discussions of science and religion among philosophers and others. (Frankly, I am fed up with ignorant claims and bad arguments that get more attention than they deserve. Philosophers need to engage more in debates in the public sphere as a form of public service for which we are naturally suited.)

O.k., enough about such trivialities, here's the really important thing: six years ago, in the absence of a controlling legal authority, I declared myself to be Philo-Pong World 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. I expect to have to relinquish the World title on my next trip to China, which may happen as soon as March 2011. (The talent there is just too deep, and I'll be jet-lagged and on a non-standard diet to boot.) After that, I hope to organize a proper tournament to determine a worthy challenger who can then take a shot at the American title. I'm thinking that might have it at the Central APA meeting in Minneapolis in late March 2011, followed by the epic title match at the 2012 Central in Chicago (my home turf). If you would be interested in participating, please let me know.