Jenann Ismael

Jenann Tareq Ismael (born 1968) is a professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi.) Ismael's work has been influential in the scholarship of metaphysics and the philosophy of physics.

Education and career Ismael earned her M.A. and PhD from Princeton University in 1994 and 1997, where her dissertation advisor was Bas van Fraassen. She has also published on such issues as the conflict between lived experience and physics, the implications of physics on issues of freedom, death, the nature of the self, and the problem of free will. The book has three distinct parts: the first part deals primarily with reflexive representation and its uses, the second part applies the idea of reflexive representation to famous problems of the philosophy of mind, and the third attempts to lay out a new conception of what the self is.

Causation, Free Will and Naturalism (paper 2012) In this paper, Ismael addresses the question of free will from a physics perspective, reconciling the "happy confidence in one's own powers to bring things about" and "recent developments in the scientific understanding of causal concepts." From the broad scientific perspective, dynamical laws seem to preclude not only most folk notions of free will, but the very concept of causality in general. However "interventionist account" of causality, independently developed by Clark Glymour and Judea Pearl, makes sense of considering the impacts of our human behavior on the system. "We need causal information to decide how to act..."

How Physics Makes Us Free (2016) Her book How Physics Makes Us Free was selected by John Farrell of Forbes Magazine as 2016 Book of the Year.