John Hyman, (The Queen’s College) “Responsibility and the Special Question, ‘Why’?”
The study of responsibility in philosophy is mainly focused on skepticism about the existence of free will and on the question whether moral responsibility is compatible with physical determinism. By contrast, legal theories of responsibility are guided by the analysis of legal procedures, mainly in criminal and tort trials. I shall argue that the conception of responsibility developed by legal theorists has the potential to transform the study of responsibility in philosophy.
Biography: John Hyman is Professor of Aesthetics and a Fellow of The Queen’s College, Oxford. He was a Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles in 2001-02, a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2002 -03, a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow in 2010-12, Professeur Invité at the Université Paris-Sorbonne in 2014-15, and Santander Cátedra de Excelencia at the Univ. Carlos III de Madrid in 2017. His most recent books are Action, Knowledge, and Will (OUP, 2015), and (ed. with H-J Glock) A Companion to Wittgenstein (Wiley, 2017). He has edited the British Journal of Aesthetics since 2008.