7/10/2019 – 112th PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: Helen Steward on Free Will and External Reality: Two Scepticisms Compared

As the first talk for the 2019-20 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, this year’s Presidential Address marks the official inauguration of Professor Helen Steward (University of Leeds) as the 112th President of the Aristotelian Society. The Society’s President is elected on the basis of lifelong, exemplary work in philosophy.

Helen Steward is Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Action at the University of Leeds. She received her D.Phil from the University of Oxford in 1992. Before moving to Leeds in 2007, she was Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford for 14 years. Her research interests lie mainly in the philosophy of action and free will, the philosophy of mind, and the metaphysical and ontological issues which bear on these areas (e.g. causation, supervenience, levels of explanation, the event/state distinction, the concepts of process and power). She has also worked on the category of animality and on understandings of the human being which take seriously our membership of the animal kingdom, and related biological and evolutionary perspectives on ourselves. She is the author of The Ontology of Mind (Oxford: OUP, 1997) and A Metaphysics for Freedom (Oxford: OUP, 2012), as well as many papers on free will, agency, mental causation and ontology of mind.

The 112th Presidential Address was chaired by Jonathan Wolff (Oxford) – 111th President of the Aristotelian Society.

This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Steward's address - 'Free Will and External Reality: Two Scepticisms Compared' - at the Aristotelian Society on 7 October 2019. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.