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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
 
Michael Lockwood

Michael Lockwood has explored the philosophical implications of several fields of physics, including quantum physics, thermodynamics, and special and general relativity.

In his 1989 book, Mind, Brain, and the Quantum: the Compound 'I', Lockwood explores how quantum theory may help to solve the mind-body problem and the problem of consciousness.

The connection of quantum mechanics with consciousness began in the early history of quantum mechanics, when a measurement of a quantum system was mistakenly made dependent on the "conscious observer." The connection persists, primarily because both are "mysteries," says Lockwood. (See also John Searle and Peter van Inwagen.) Can it be argued that consciousness is somehow an inherently quantum-mechanical phenomena?

This is a fairly old idea (with little, formerly, to back it up beyond some half-formulated notion that since quantum mechanics is mysterious and so is consciousness, these two mysteries may perhaps be related).
(Mind, Brain, and Quantum Mechanics, p.36)
In this work, Lockwood examines problems also explored by physicists Roger Penrose and Henry Stapp, and by the Australian philosopher David Hodgson.
Lockwood carefully examines the notion that special relativity can show that the world is deterministic, an idea first proposed by the philosophers C. W. Rietdijk and Hilary Putnam in the 1960's.

The idea that a special-relativistic "tenseless" block universe implies a deterministic universe by J.J.C.Smart in 1964. This view denies the openness of the future, which is "already out there." Smart thinks that Einstein's theory of special relativity has rendered obsolete our common sense view of time. Lockwood also subscribes to this view.

Time has become a fourth dimension; and an individual persisting object, such as a human body, is to be conceived as a four-dimensional 'worm', laid out in space-time, each three-dimensional time-slice of which corresponds to the object as it is at a particular moment in its history. (The set of space-time points occupied by this 'worm' — if one ignores the fact that it has spatial thickness as well as temporal length — is known as the object's world-line.) In this conception there is no universal march or flow of time. There cannot be, because there is no universal present; and consequently there is no universal past or future...

This makes trouble, incidentally, for a conception of time that many philosophers from Aristotle to the present day have wished to defend, according to which the future is open, partially undefined, in contrast to the past, which is fixed, closed, a fait accompli. The motivation for such a view lies mainly in a desire to defend free will, to enable us to regard the future (in words I once saw in the Reader's Digest) as 'not there waiting for us, but something we make as we go along'. In the context of relativity (as is pointed out by Hilary Putnam), such a view appears not so much false as meaningless.
(Mind, Brain, and Quantum Mechanics, p.207)

Lockwood also challenges the standard interpreation of quantum mechanics. He finds no good reason for believing in the collapse of the wave function.

I think there are very good reasons for not believing in it. The first is the fact, noted by von Neumann, that there doesn't appear to be anything in quantum mechanics itself to say where, in the measurement chain, the collapse should occur. Some extra deus ex machina is called for; and considerations of theoretical economy suggest that we should avoid introducing such new elements unless we are forced to do so.
(Mind, Brain, and Quantum Mechanics, p.207)
Lockwood prefers the relative state formulation of quantum mechanics of Hugh Everett, popularly known as "many-worlds," which avoids collapses
I am not claiming that nothing ever happens. Rather the reverse: on a relative state view, absolutely everything that (physically) can happen does happen, in the sense that it is to be found somewhere in the cosmic wave function.
(Mind, Brain, and Quantum Mechanics, p.289)
In his 2005 book, The Labyrinth of Time, Lockwood re-examines and reaffirms his analysis of time beyond the "tenseless" block universe. He notes that the tenseless nature of time rules out free will for reasons deeper than any determinism. Future events are simply already there, have already happened.
I conclude, therefore, that Einstein, Eddington, and Jeans were right all along, in placing the philosophical construction that they did on Minkowski's work. To take the space-time view seriously is indeed to regard everything that ever exists, or ever happens, at any time or place, as being just as real as the contents of the here and now. And this rules out any conception of free will that pictures human agents, through their choices, as selectively conferring actuality on what are initially only potentialities. Contrary to this common-sense conception, the world according to Minkowski is, at all times and places, actuality through and through: a four-dimensional block universe. The stark choice that faces us, therefore, is either to accept this view, with all that it may entail for such concepts as that of < ahref="/freedom/moral_responsibility.html">moral responsibility, or else to insist that relativistic invariance is a superficial phenomenon — a misleading façade, behind which is a genuine, honest-to-goodness passage of time, in which certain preferred spacelike hypersurfaces successively bear the mantle of objective presentness. Nothing we have so far established prevents us from adopting such a view, even if, from the standpoint of physics, it remains wholly gratuitous.

We saw earlier that the implications of the space–time view for our attitudes towards death are in some respects very appealing. By contrast, however, most people seem to want to believe in free will, in a sense that we have shown to be incompatible with the space–time view. Perhaps this is because they are labouring under the misconception that, by 'placing them in the driving seat,' free will, in this metaphysical sense, somehow enhances the likelihood that they will succeed in realizing their goals. But there are no good grounds for believing this. For such free will would be inherently double-edged. Were it to exist, there is no more reason to think that it would increase the rationality of your behaviour than to think that it would decrease it. To be free, after all, is to be free to perform foolish actions no less than wise ones!

Moreover, the alternative view that everything that ever has or ever will happen should be regarded as equally real has significant attractions of its own, and ones that are more firmly grounded, philosophically speaking. In fact, the denial of the openness of the future can, paradoxically, prove very liberating. Specifically, those who manage really to take to heart the idea that all events are eternally real will no longer be tormented by thoughts of 'what might have been'; no longer will they be constantly saying to themselves 'If only I had done such-and such'. For they will acknowledge that at no time are future events anything other than actualities lying in store for us. Any lingering inclination they may have to view their past lives as being littered with missed opportunities and avoidable mistakes will be extinguished by the thought that neither the seizing of the `opportunities, nor the avoidance of the mistakes, ever existed as genuine potentialities. It is, as they will now see it, merely our inability, in general actually to foresee the future that blinds us to the fact that it is as much part of reality as are the present and the past.
(Labyrinth of Time, p.68-70)

Lockwood also examines the question of time asymmetry between past and future. This is Arthur Stanley Eddington's idea for an arrow of time, a consequence of the growth of entropy that is required by the second law of thermodynamics.

He recounts Ludwig Boltzmann's difficulties proving that the entropy must always increase (Boltzmann's H-theorem) in the face of criticisms from Josef Loschmidt (the paradox of microscopic reversibility), Ernst Zermelo (the paradox of eternal recurrence), and others.

For Teachers
For Scholars
Notes

1.

Bibliography

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