Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference

Conference Description, Mission, and Goals

I. Conference Description

The Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference (INPC) is a topic-focused conference that brings together those from the humanities and beyond who are interested in the philosophical investigation of key areas of thought. The project is being planned by Joseph Keim-Campbell and David Shier, Assistant Professors of Philosophy at Washington State University, and Michael O'Rourke, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Idaho. The 2001 INPC will consist of four distinct parts:

• Paper sessions beginning on Friday, April 27 and continuing until Sunday, April 29. Roughly 33 papers will be delivered during this time in concurrent sessions. Each session will run 70 minutes in length, and most sessions will include formal comment.
  
  
• On Saturday evening in Moscow, ID, there will be a keynote address delivered by Keith Lehrer, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. 
  
  
• A public forum will take place on the evening of Friday, April 27 at the Kenworthy Theater on Main Street in Moscow, ID. The forum will begin with ten minute presentations by a panel of experts in the areas of law, biology, psychology, and philosophy. Experts will address the topic: Mad or Bad?: Biological Determinism and Criminal Responsibility. Following the presentations by panel members, there will be a moderated discussion involving the audience and members of the panel. The moderator will field comments and questions from the audience and direct them to the relevant panel members.
  
  
• The conference closes Sunday, April 29 with a workshop in the Commons Building at the University of Idaho. The workshop gives participants a chance to reflect on the conference as a whole and to offer any remaining comments, criticisms, or questions. The workshop will conclude with a moderated discussion period. As with the public forum, audience members need not be well-versed in technical jargon to participate.
  

All of the conference activities will be open to the general public, and so anyone who has an interest in freedom and determinism can attend.

II. Topic

This year's INPC topic is freedom and determinism. Interest in this topic is grounded in the following problem. On the one hand, we tend to regard the majority of humans as free and autonomous beings who are responsible for their own actions. On the other hand, this seems to conflict with a variety of attitudes that we have about the world around us. Some, for instance, believe that the world was created by an omniscient God who knows the future in complete detail. Others think that it is governed by strict, universal laws of nature. Both views suggest that each particular event - including each human action - has an unwavering kind of necessity and so both views appear to be in conflict with the claim that we are free. Hence, the problem of freedom and determinism is, at base, a problem about reconciling attitudes that we have about ourselves with more general thoughts about the world we find ourselves in. It is a problem about locating ourselves within the universe. For this reason, freedom and determinism, as well as the alleged conflict between them, are of interest to a variety of humanists from distinct backgrounds and disciplines.

Freedom is often discussed within the context of broader theoretical concerns about the nature of moral and legal responsibility. For it is a basic assumption that some kind of freedom is a necessary precondition for our being held accountable for our actions. Even those who claim that we are never responsible for anything often do so because they believe that we lack the requisite freedom. Consequently, the assumption of freedom plays a role in our beliefs about the appropriateness of praise and blame, among other things. We find it absurd to blame a rock that crashes through our window but acceptable to blame the child who threw the rock - and we consider such blame even more legitimate if the person were an adult with normal cognitive capacities. In trying to uncover the basis for these differences in attitude we encounter other, more fundamental distinctions in moral psychology between action and passion, belief and desire, reason and emotion, and control and compulsion. Not surprisingly, persons in the fields of ethics, law, criminal justice, and psychology all share an interest in understanding the nature of human freedom. This remains true even for those who deny that we are free since some understanding of the nature of freedom is implicit in its denial.

Determinism, as well as its presumed conflict with freedom, is also of great concern to humanists. Many forms of determinism are theological in nature. According to St. Augustine, for instance, God is the ultimate cause of all things. Reconciling this view with the apparent evil in the world was a central preoccupation of his thought. Martin Luther believed that God's power entailed complete predestination. Rather than question this power he was willing to place limits on human freedom which led to an eventual split with traditional Catholic doctrine and played an important role in the Protestant Reformation. The assumption of determinism can also be found in the views of such diverse and influential social thinkers as Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Auguste Comte. Thus, humanists in theology, history, and sociology have a stake in better understanding these theories and problems. This interest goes beyond the humanities, as well. Prior to the 20th Century, determinism was an unquestioned assumption in the physical sciences. Even though most contemporary physicists believe that evidence from quantum mechanics suggests that the world is not determined, the account of time endorsed by Einstein's relativity theory as well as recent findings in the field of genetics bring forth other forms of determinism which, in turn, create new worries. Moreover, indeterministic models of causation and explanation are relatively new and are in need of careful explication and debate. For this year's INPC, we have designed special sessions to deal with most of these topics.

III. Mission and Goals

The general mission of the INPC is to provide a forum for public discussion of classically philosophical topics. Our conference is intended to help facilitate research on such topics, to illustrate to non-philosophers the importance and pervasiveness of philosophy in our daily lives, and to help improve the intellectual atmosphere of the Moscow/Pullman community. We consider the project to be a bridge between the academy and the non-academic community and as such it is vital to our mission and goals.

The general goal of the INPC is to encourage philosophical interaction on a variety of different levels between philosophers and non-philosophers, teachers and students, academics and lay-persons. One goal is to generate interdisciplinary involvement in the conference. Such involvement benefits all involved. First, it exposes those from outside the humanities to research methodologies that have proved very successful within philosophy and other humanistic disciplines. Second, it enables researchers within the humanities to learn of ideas and strategies that are used by those who are working on issues related to meaning and truth in disciplines such as linguistics, rhetoric, and psychology. Another goal is to introduce non-philosophers (both academics and non-academics) to the particular methodologies utilized by philosophers. It is hoped that this will give everyone a broader understanding of what philosophy is, why it is important, and how philosophy and the humanities in general can be of value in their lives. A final goal of the project is to strengthen the connections between the academic and non-academic communities in the Pullman/Moscow area. The public forum and workshop are important parts of the conference since they allow us to create links between both philosophy and the other humanities as well as the academic and non-academic communities. They are designed with the non-academic community in mind. It will be possible for those who lack the technical vocabulary and training to attend these events and appreciate the importance of research related to freedom and determimism both within academic disciplines and outside of them. We anticipate that the benefits of these events will also run in the other direction, as questions from the non-academic community often offer substantial challenges to researchers. 

The Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference is a topic-focused interdisciplinary conference supported in part by a grant from the Idaho Humanities Council, a State-Based Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities and co-sponsored by the Philosophy Departments at the University of Idaho and Washington State University.