I am an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department and the Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State, and I am Director of Undergraduate Studies in philosophy.  Before coming to Georgia State University in 2005, I taught at Florida State University, after receiving my PhD in Philosophy from Duke University in 2001.  My research is devoted to the study of human agency: what it is, how to study it, and how it accords with scientific accounts of human nature. My primary focus right now is the free will debate.  In several papers (available at my website: http://www2.gsu.edu/~phlean/) and in my current book project, Rediscovering Free Will, I argue that we should re-focus debates about free will and moral responsibility away from the traditional threat of determinism towards more relevant and significant threats posed by certain theories of mind and by scientific research in the modern mind sciences.  I develop a naturalistic theory of free will that focuses on cognitive capacities associated with self-knowledge and self-control, and hence I suggest that free will has important connections with wisdom.  I also carry out research in "experimental philosophy" on ordinary people's views about free will and responsibility.  And I examine how various sciences of the mind (e.g., social psychology and neuroscience) pose challenges to free will.  I also examine research that helps to explain—rather than explain away—the cognitive capacities that allow us to have significant types of freedom and responsibility.  I enjoy teaching very much and find that my research is motivated by my attempts to make philosophical questions interesting and relevant to my students.