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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
Jeremy Butterfield
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Nancy Cartwright
Gregg Caruso
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Tom Clark
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 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
James Ladyman
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
Ernest Nagel
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
U.T.Place
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
John Duns Scotus
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
David Shiang
Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Peter Slezak
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
Simon Conway-Morris
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 Dupré
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
Augustin-Jean Fresnel
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
Grete Hermann
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
Werner Loewenstein
Hendrik Lorentz
Josef Loschmidt
Alfred Lotka
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
Travis Norsen
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
A.A. Roback
Emil Roduner
Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
Robert Sapolsky
Tilman Sauer
Ferdinand de Saussure
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Erwin Schrödinger
Aaron Schurger
Sebastian Seung
Thomas Sebeok
Franco Selleri
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
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
C. S. Unnikrishnan
Nico van Kampen
Francisco Varela
Vlatko Vedral
Vladimir Vernadsky
Mikhail Volkenstein
Heinz von Foerster
Richard von Mises
John von Neumann
Jakob von Uexküll
C. H. Waddington
James D. Watson
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
Jeffrey Wicken
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
 
John Dupré
John A. Dupré is a British philosopher of science who in 2002 started Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences at the University of Exeter, and directed it until 2022. Dupré is a founding member of the "Stanford School" of philosophy of science, along with Nancy Cartwright, Ian Hacking, Patrick Suppes and Peter Galison.

The Stanford School generally opposed the Unity of Science movement, characterized by the claims "chemistry can be reduced to physics, and biology can be reduced to chemistry."

A decade before the founding conference of the Stanford School, Dupré's 1993 book, The Disorder of Things, proposed a refutation of reductionism and determinism. He was skeptical about the idea of causal closure, that every physical event has a necessary and sufficient physical cause. This leads Dupré to reject reductionism, for example Jaegwon Kim's physicalism, which Kim calls the "causal closure of the world."

Dupré wrote...

The best way to introduce the position against which this book will argue is to consider the continuing influence of one particularly notorious founding metaphor of modern science, the idea that the universe should be considered as a gigantic machine. Traditionally the favored machine has been a clock... Anyone who thinks that such mechanical metaphors have faded in significance might reflect on the amount of scientific effort that has been devoted in recent years to investigation of the hypothesis that the human brain — and generally also the human mind — is really a kind of calculating machine, or computer.

The philosophical thesis most intimately connected with this mechanistic metaphor is determinism. The cosmic clock, we must assume given its provenance, has always told the correct time and always will. To achieve such precision its components must exhibit the same unvarying reliability as the whole. Once the clock is wound up and set in motion, its behavior and that of all its parts are determined for all eternity.

...the current vogue for chaos theory suggests that certain aspects of this complexity may be in principle beyond the reach of certain kinds of comprehension, notably prediction. Nevertheless, the metaphysical conceptions of order that originated in the picture of the mechanical universe seem to have been little threatened, if sometimes modified, by such developments. The case of chaos theory nicely illustrates this resilience. Prediction, though long conceived as a very central excellence of scientific understanding, is a goal that has tended to recede rather than approach as various scientific disciplines have increased their understanding of the complexity of the phenomena within their domains. Chaos theory appears to confront prediction not merely with an insuperable practical difficulty, but with a logically impassable obstacle. Yet paradoxically determinism, the metaphysical underlay of :he possibility of prediction, is strengthened rather than threatened by this development. For the central mathematical functions of chaos theory are quite deterministic...Even the increasing prevalence of probabilistic rather than deterministic hypotheses and methods from quantum mechanics up through the scientific hierarchy has not, I shall argue, led to the rejection of some of the most fundamental features of the deterministic world view.

Dupré describes the reductionism idea that he is rejecting ("everything reduces to physics").
To begin with, it will help to introduce what is perhaps both the clearest and the strongest version, which I shall call classical reductionism. Assume, first, a hierarchical classification of objects in which the objects at each level are complex structures of the objects com- prising the next-lower level. Paul Oppenheim and Hilary Putnam propose the following levels: elementary particles, atoms, molecules, living cells, multicellular organisms, and social groups. The investigation of each level is the task of a particular domain of science, which aims to discern the laws governing the behavior of the objects at that level. Reduction consists in deriving the laws at each higher (reduced) level from the laws governing the objects at the next-lower (reducing) level. Such reduction, in addition to knowledge of the laws at both the reducing and reduced levels, will also require so-called bridge principles (or bridge laws) identifying the kinds of objects at the reduced level with particular structures of the objects at the reducing level. Given the transitivity of such deductive derivation, the endpoint of this program will reveal the whole of science to have been derived from nothing but the laws of the lowest level and the bridge principles. The lowest level will be the physics of elementary particles. Thus, finally, truly basic science need concern itself only with the objects described by particle physics.

In 2012, Dupré offered the book Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology

In 2018, with his Exeter colleague D.J. Nicholson, he published Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology

In 2022, Dupré delivered a Gifford Lecture on A Brief History of Form at the University of Aberdeen. In 2023 he delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh on A Process Perspective on Human Life, based on the book Everything Flows.

Dupré's "process perspective" argues

"that it is a mistake to suppose that processes require underlying things, or substances... Instead of thinking of processes as belonging to things, we should think of things as being derived from processes. This does not mean that things do not exist, even less that thing-concepts cannot be extremely useful or illuminating. What it does imply is that things cannot be regarded as the basic building blocks of reality. What we identify as things are no more than transient patterns of stability in the surrounding flux, temporary eddies in the continuous flow of process."

Dupré's Processual Philosophy of Biology identifies an essential difference between the atomic and molecular processes of physics and chemistry and the organic processes of the macromolecules of biology.

By contrast, information philosophy identifies a single cosmic creation process from the first few minutes of the universe, when elementary particles like protons and neutrons formed from the primordial quarks, gluons, electrons, and photons. It took hundreds of thousands of years before the universe cooled down and stable atoms could form atoms from protons, neutrons, and electrons. It was hundreds of millions of years before atoms could collapse under gravitational forces to produce planets, stars, and galaxies, and billions of years before life formed on one of those planets.

Both physics and biology involve very special anti-entropic processes information philosophy calls ergodic (information creating).
Information philosophy agrees with Dupré that there is an essential difference in the processes that create new purely physical things as opposed to new living biological entities. He is correct that physical processes are reductive and eliminative materialist. But both physical and biological processes are emergent, creating new information structures, and apparently defying the second law of thermodynamics, which says entropy (disorder) can only increase,.

The first information structures formed in the early universe, elementary particles, atoms and molecules, galaxies, stars, and planets, are all the result of microscopic quantum cooperative phenomena and macroscopic gravitational forces. These "things" are not acting. They are being acted upon by the forces of Nature

But with the emergence of life, information replication, information communication, and information processing begin. Only then is information itself used in the creation of new - living - information structures. Living things are biological information processors, forms through which matter and energy flows, with capabilities far beyond the electronic digital computers that cognitive scientists think provide a “computational theory of mind.”

Most important, living things have “purposes.” They engage in communications of information with other living things and with their environment. Their messaging is meaningful, allowing them to be active users of information - which makes them agents, compared to passive material things, whose structural information is largely inert and meaningless in itself.

Since the total of matter and energy in the universe is a conserved constant, it's the arrangement of the matter and energy that is the information. Information philosophy (and science) tells us who or what is doing the arranging. In physics and chemistry, the forces in processes creating more complex objects are purely passive. In all of biology the active forces creating more complex organisms deploy information templates (e.g., the "central dogma" of DNA to mRNA to proteins). At animal and human levels these active creative processes become intentional, "mind over matter."

As Dupré's former colleague Anne Sophie Meincke stressed in a recent Vienna conference, living things are "agents." They introduce purpose into the universe.

We should note that where Dupré argues that "things cannot be regarded as the basic building blocks of reality," philosopher Trenton Merricks argues the exact opposite, defending "mereological nihilism, the idea that there are no composite objects, only "simples" arranged to look like objects. Or as Peter van Inwagen said in his 1990 book Material Beings, There are "no tables, only simples arranged tablewise."

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