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Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
Samuel Alexander
William Alston
Anaximander
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Louise Antony
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Harald Atmanspacher
Robert Audi
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
Jeffrey Barrett
William Barrett
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
George Berkeley
Isaiah Berlin
Richard J. Bernstein
Bernard Berofsky
Robert Bishop
Max Black
Susanne Bobzien
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Hilary Bok
Laurence BonJour
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
Daniel Boyd
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
Michael Burke
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Nancy Cartwright
Gregg Caruso
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Dupré
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
Austin Farrer
Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
John Martin Fischer
Frederic Fitch
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Bas van Fraassen
Michael Frede
Gottlob Frege
Peter Geach
Edmund Gettier
Carl Ginet
Alvin Goldman
Gorgias
Nicholas St. John Green
H.Paul Grice
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
Sam Harris
William Hasker
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
Heraclitus
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Baron d'Holbach
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
Ferenc Huoranszki
Frank Jackson
William James
Lord Kames
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
Walter Kaufmann
Jaegwon Kim
William King
Hilary Kornblith
Christine Korsgaard
Saul Kripke
Thomas Kuhn
Andrea Lavazza
Christoph Lehner
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Jules Lequyer
Leucippus
Michael Levin
Joseph Levine
George Henry Lewes
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
C. Lloyd Morgan
John Locke
Michael Lockwood
Arthur O. Lovejoy
E. Jonathan Lowe
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
Alasdair MacIntyre
Ruth Barcan Marcus
Tim Maudlin
James Martineau
Nicholas Maxwell
Storrs McCall
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Brian McLaughlin
John McTaggart
Paul E. Meehl
Uwe Meixner
Alfred Mele
Trenton Merricks
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Otto Neurath
Friedrich Nietzsche
John Norton
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
Parmenides
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
Plato
Karl Popper
Porphyry
Huw Price
H.A.Prichard
Protagoras
Hilary Putnam
Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
Ayn Rand
Michael Rea
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
C.W.Rietdijk
Richard Rorty
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
Jean-Paul Sartre
Kenneth Sayre
T.M.Scanlon
Moritz Schlick
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
Baruch Spinoza
L. Susan Stebbing
Isabelle Stengers
George F. Stout
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Francisco Suárez
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Mark Twain
Peter Unger
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
Voltaire
G.H. von Wright
David Foster Wallace
R. Jay Wallace
W.G.Ward
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
C.F. von Weizsäcker
William Whewell
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Timothy Williamson
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

David Albert
Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Marcello Barbieri
Gregory Bateson
Horace Barlow
John S. Bell
Mara Beller
Charles Bennett
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Susan Blackmore
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Emile Borel
Max Born
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Bothe
Jean Bricmont
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Melvin Calvin
Donald Campbell
Sadi Carnot
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Rudolf Clausius
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
Jerry Coyne
John Cramer
Francis Crick
E. P. Culverwell
Antonio Damasio
Olivier Darrigol
Charles Darwin
Richard Dawkins
Terrence Deacon
Lüder Deecke
Richard Dedekind
Louis de Broglie
Stanislas Dehaene
Max Delbrück
Abraham de Moivre
Bernard d'Espagnat
Paul Dirac
Hans Driesch
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Manfred Eigen
Albert Einstein
George F. R. Ellis
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
Richard Feynman
R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
Benjamin Gal-Or
Howard Gardner
Lila Gatlin
Michael Gazzaniga
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
GianCarlo Ghirardi
J. Willard Gibbs
James J. Gibson
Nicolas Gisin
Paul Glimcher
Thomas Gold
A. O. Gomes
Brian Goodwin
Joshua Greene
Dirk ter Haar
Jacques Hadamard
Mark Hadley
Patrick Haggard
J. B. S. Haldane
Stuart Hameroff
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Ralph Hartley
Hyman Hartman
Jeff Hawkins
John-Dylan Haynes
Donald Hebb
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
John Herschel
Basil Hiley
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Don Howard
John H. Jackson
William Stanley Jevons
Roman Jakobson
E. T. Jaynes
Pascual Jordan
Eric Kandel
Ruth E. Kastner
Stuart Kauffman
Martin J. Klein
William R. Klemm
Christof Koch
Simon Kochen
Hans Kornhuber
Stephen Kosslyn
Daniel Koshland
Ladislav Kovàč
Leopold Kronecker
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Karl Lashley
David Layzer
Joseph LeDoux
Gerald Lettvin
Gilbert Lewis
Benjamin Libet
David Lindley
Seth Lloyd
Hendrik Lorentz
Werner Loewenstein
Josef Loschmidt
Ernst Mach
Donald MacKay
Henry Margenau
Owen Maroney
David Marr
Humberto Maturana
James Clerk Maxwell
Ernst Mayr
John McCarthy
Warren McCulloch
N. David Mermin
George Miller
Stanley Miller
Ulrich Mohrhoff
Jacques Monod
Vernon Mountcastle
Emmy Noether
Donald Norman
Alexander Oparin
Abraham Pais
Howard Pattee
Wolfgang Pauli
Massimo Pauri
Wilder Penfield
Roger Penrose
Steven Pinker
Colin Pittendrigh
Walter Pitts
Max Planck
Susan Pockett
Henri Poincaré
Daniel Pollen
Ilya Prigogine
Hans Primas
Zenon Pylyshyn
Henry Quastler
Adolphe Quételet
Pasco Rakic
Nicolas Rashevsky
Lord Rayleigh
Frederick Reif
Jürgen Renn
Giacomo Rizzolati
Emil Roduner
Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
Tilman Sauer
Ferdinand de Saussure
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Erwin Schrödinger
Aaron Schurger
Sebastian Seung
Thomas Sebeok
Franco Selleri
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
David Shiang
Abner Shimony
Herbert Simon
Dean Keith Simonton
Edmund Sinnott
B. F. Skinner
Lee Smolin
Ray Solomonoff
Roger Sperry
John Stachel
Henry Stapp
Tom Stonier
Antoine Suarez
Leo Szilard
Max Tegmark
Teilhard de Chardin
Libb Thims
William Thomson (Kelvin)
Richard Tolman
Giulio Tononi
Peter Tse
Alan Turing
Francisco Varela
Vlatko Vedral
Mikhail Volkenstein
Heinz von Foerster
Richard von Mises
John von Neumann
Jakob von Uexküll
C. S. Unnikrishnan
C. H. Waddington
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
Wilhelm Wien
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Günther Witzany
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
Semir Zeki
Ernst Zermelo
Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky

Presentations

Biosemiotics
Free Will
Mental Causation
James Symposium
 
Peter Lipton

Peter Lipton was a Cambidge University philosopher of science and epistemologist. He wrote an important essay on the threat to free will from genetic determinism in The New Brain Sciences, edited by Dai Rees and Steven Rose.

Lipton captures the causal determinist analysis of most neuroscientists in his essay, and adds an extensive version of the standard argument against free will, which he calls "the philosopher's classic free will dilemma."

Lipton sees little hope that any genetic factors can help in the problem of "generic determinism." This is of course quite right. Genetic and environmental factors enter into the "built-in" and adequately determined factors that are used in the evaluations and deliberations stage of a two-stage free will.

Genetic and generic determinism: a new threat to free will?

We are discovering more and more about human genotypes and about the connections between genotype and behaviour. Do these advances in genetic information threaten our free will? This chapter offers a philosopher's perspective on the question.

Whether or not genetic discoveries do really threaten free will, many feel threatened, and it is not difficult to see why. If genetic advances enable us to predict with increasing accuracy and reliability what people will do, this seems to undermine the pretensions of individual autonomy and agency. In what sense do I choose for myself what I do, if you can say reliably in advance what that choice will be?

The free will dilemma is a hardy philosophical perennial. After thousands of years of work there is still no generally accepted solution, no clear demonstration that free will really is possible. A philosopher may well wonder how new genetic knowledge could make things any worse, or indeed make things any different.

THE SCEPTICAL DILEMMA AND DIMINISHED RESPONSIBILITY
To see why a philosopher might suspect that genetic information could not possibly make the problem of free will any worse than it already is, we need to consider the classic free will dilemma, an argument with three very plausible premises and a depressing conclusion.

Here Lipton presents the standard argument against free will
First, everything that happens in the world is either determined or not. Second, if everything is determined, there is no free will. For then every action would be fixed by earlier events, indeed events that took place before the actor was born. Third, if on the other hand not everything is determined, then there is no free will either. For in this case any given action is either determined, which is no good, or undetermined. But if what you do is undetermined then you are not controlling it, so it is not an exercise of free will. Finally, we have the conclusion: there is no free will. The argument has the form: heads or tails, if heads you lose, if tails you lose, therefore you just lose. Either determinism holds or it doesn't, if determinism holds there is no free will, if it does not hold there is not free will, therefore there just is no free will.

The dilemma is remarkably simple, and it packs an immediate punch. Let me nevertheless add a few comments on its structure and elements. The argument is clearly valid, in virtue of its form. To say that an argument is valid is not to say that its conclusion is true, but just that if the premises are all true, then the conclusion must be true as well, or equivalently that it is impossible for all the premises to be true yet the conclusion false. So anyone who wishes to reject the conclusion must also reject at least one of the premises. The argument does not assume any particular facts about our world, which suggests that the problem lies not in our world but in our concept. If the free will dilemma is sound — that is valid and with true premises — it seems to show that the very notion of free will is incoherent, something that could not possibly exist, a round square.

The first premise is indisputable, since it has the tautologous form P or not-P — everything is determined or not everything is determined. (Note that this is not the same as the disputable claim that either everything is determined or nothing is.) Just what determinism entails is a much more difficult question, and there are several different versions of the concept that could be deployed, though the first premise remains a tautology whichever one is chosen. The two most common versions of determinism appeal to causation or to the laws of nature. Thus determinism may be taken to be the view that everything that happens has a cause, or the view that everything that happens follows necessarily from the laws of nature in conjunction with the full state of the universe at any single moment. In fact this yields more than two conceptions of determinism, since the concepts of cause and law have themselves been given diverse philosophical treatment. Thus, some suppose that a cause is a condition sufficient for its effect, while others claim rather that it is necessary, something without which the effect would not have occurred. And while some philosophers have supposed that laws are simple de facto regularities, others have claimed that laws describe what happens by necessity, what could not have been otherwise.

The second premise of the dilemma, which asserts the incompatibility of free will and determinism, lacks the iron-clad security of a tautology, but there are powerful considerations in its favour. Free will seems to entail that the actor 'could have done otherwise', while determinism rules this out. The incompatibility of determinism with 'could have done otherwise' is particularly clear when determinism is defined in terms of the laws of nature (van Inwagen, 1975). If determinism is true, then what I did is entailed by laws of nature along with some particular facts about the state of the world before I was born. To have the power to have done otherwise, I would have to have the power either to change the laws or to change those prenatal facts. Clearly neither is possible.

Those who have tried to show that determinism and free will are nevertheless compatible have typically observed that the claim that my action was determined is compatible with my desires being among its causes and so that I would have acted differently, had my desires been different (Ayer, 1954). But defenders of the second premise reply that this is not enough to show that I could have done otherwise, if my desires are themselves just intermediate links in a long deterministic chain stretching back before my birth. In such a case, that people would have acted differently had their desires been different seems no more to show that they could have done otherwise than would saying that they would have acted differently, had the weather been different. Neither circumstance shows they have the power to change what they would do.

Another way of resisting the second premise is to question the connection between free will and 'could have done otherwise'. The desire being a cause of the action — which determinism allows — is clearly insufficient for free will. The addict is a model of someone whose free will has been compromised, though the addict desires the drug and that desire affects behaviour. But it has been suggested that what rules out free will in such cases is not that everything is determined, or that the agent could not have done otherwise, but rather that the addict does not have desires that are related to each other in the right way. For example, it has been claimed that the addict lacks free will because his desire for the drug is determined by the drug itself, rather than by higher-order commitment to wanting the drug (Frankfurt, 1971). Even if the addict is strangely happy to crave the drug, the craving is caused by the drug, not by the desire to crave. Ultimately, we all have desires we do not choose, but on this view what enables those of us who are not addicts to enjoy free will is that many of our desires are maintained because they are themselves desired. The defender of the second premise will not be satisfied by this, however, and will insist that the harmony of our mental economy is not enough to make room for the possibility of free will, if that entire economy and the actions it generates were determined by things that occurred before we were born.

The third premise of the dilemma is that free will is not compatible with indeterminism either. Supposing that some of my actions or their causes are themselves uncaused or ungoverned by deterministic law may allow that my actions could have been otherwise, but it does lot seem to allow that I could have done otherwise. Indeterminism does not allow the agent to control her actions in the way free will requires. I do not exercise free will if my arm spontaneously rises, nor is the situation any more promising if we construe an indeterministic process as one that is irreducibly probabilistic, rather than one that is entirely random. We do not create room for free will by leaving desires undetermined or by loosening the link between desire and action.

The simplest explanation for the conspicuous absence of philosophical progress on the problem of free will is that the sceptical dilemma is sound: free will really is impossible. If that is so, then the answer to our questions about genetic information is simple, if pathological. Nothing can threaten what could not exist anyway. If free will is impossible full stop, then it is something genetic knowledge can neither reduce nor destroy.

But we may be unable to accept the sceptical dilemma, even if we cannot see exactly what is wrong with it. As Isaac Bashevis Singer is reported to have said, 'Of course I believe in free will. I can't help it.' Our disposition to treat others as free agents seems impervious to argument. The dilemma may show that our full-blooded conception of free will is incoherent, and that we must pare it down if we are to believe in something that might exist. The big question is whether this process would leave us with something still strong enough to support the use we make of the concept, and the connections we make between judgements of freedom and judgements of responsibility and dignity.

Here as elsewhere in philosophy, I think that we ought to be opportunists, willing to vary our standards to suit our purposes. Free will is not the only area where powerful reasons are given for incredible conclusions. In the theory of knowledge, for example, all the best arguments seem to show that we have no justification for what we are quite sure we do know, that the sun will rise tomorrow or indeed that anything exists outwith our minds. Taking those arguments seriously helps us to illuminate our cognitive practices, but it is also important to vary the setting on the 'sceptic dial'. Supposing the worst — that we can know almost nothing — is a way of revealing some strata of our belief practices, but for other philosophical purposes we must take some layers of our knowledge for granted.

Similarly, while for some philosophical purposes we may wish to assume that free will is indeed impossible, for others we should suppose that people do sometimes act freely. To assess the impact of genetic information on free will, it is important to consider the radical perspective of the free will dilemma, which challenges the notion of free will under any circumstances. This will save us from claiming that genetic information is a particular threat to free will because it would deprive us of something that, as we can see from the sceptical dilemma, we never had anyway. But if we are accurately to assess the impact of biomedical developments, it is also important to consider the more conventional perspective, which allows that there is a distinction to be drawn among the things we actually do, between those actions that are free and those that are not.

The conventional distinction between free and unfree behaviour treats free will as a default condition which may be compromised in various ways. Addictive behaviour is one sort of case. Certain people lack normal inhibitory mechanisms and so are unable to control their desires. Some people are unable properly to recognise or characterise the nature of some of their own actions. Here one thinks of cases of serious psychological impairment, but it is worth noting that there is also a version of this phenomenon that afflicts us all. Our actions invariably have effects we are in no position to identify: we do things unintentionally, and these are not done by our own free will. It is also worth emphasising how common are the cases both of loss of inhibitory mechanism and of ability properly to identify one's actions, as the problems of excessive drinking illustrate. On the assumption that heavy drinking is not itself always addictive behaviour, we have here also the important complication of cases where one freely chooses to make oneself unfree. And our free will may be compromised in other ways besides. Should the acquisition of genetic information be added to the list?

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