Visitor: Professor Samantha Frost

This week we welcomed Sam Frost of the University of Illinois to Kent Law School and the Future of Good Decisions project. Sam is the author of the remarkable Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human (2016, Duke). You may also know her as the editor, with Diana Coole, of Introducing the New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (2010, Duke). Sam gave a fascinating presentation of some of her work in progress: ‘The Unencumbered Self: Probability, Space-Time, and the Modern Myth of Freedom’. The talk pointed to the coincidence of Newton’s account of space and time, probabilism, and a new and emerging sense of free will and free action. This configuration, she argues, underwrote the liberal juridical subject—a figure whose freedom and responsibility rest on being separate and distinct from the context of their action.