Citation for this page in APA citation style.           Close


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
 
Augustin Frédéric Hamon

Augustin Frédéric Hamon was a late-nineteenth-century Belgian social scientist who faulted criminologists for holding criminals responsible for crimes that were caused by forces beyond their control, including a causal determinism that was a result of the laws of nature, as Hamon understood those laws.

His book, The Universal Illusion of Free Will and Criminal Responsibility, anticipates most of the arguments of today's hard determinists, impossibilists, and illusionists who deny moral responsibility.

Here is an example of Hamon's thinking from his Chapter 1, Free Will and Determinism, pp. 6-9.

The question of "Free Will or Determination" according to Fouillée is the philosophic problem par excellence.

All sciences dealing with human effort and human duties are based on this question upon which our social edifice seems to rest. The adoption of the "free will" theory or of the theory of determination must necessarily influence every social problem.

One of the most important branches of criminological science, that of responsibility, penality, and the repression of crimes and misdemeanors, is completely changed according to whether free will is admitted or not. At the threshold of criminology, therefore, it is important to examine this philosophic problem, to have our conception on this point well established.

For centuries upon centuries free will and necessity have been discussed. Philosophers and theologians have heaped volumes upon volumes, the one side holding to free will, the others, protagonists of the doctrine of necessity. The Stoics, Manicheans, Marcionites, Priscillianists, Calvin, Jansenists, and Thomists were of the latter opinion, while Epicurus, the Molinists, Melancthon, and many more defended the doctrine of free will. Historians and poets, Latins as well as Greeks, have invoked inexorable fate at every instant, the will of the gods as the cause of human acts. This is, in fact, to deny free will. St. Augustine, the great Catholic doctor, broke lances over the subject of Grace, and proclaimed: "Man is invincibly destined either to bad by his natural corruption or to good by the Holy Ghost." And Boyle was able to draw from the doctrine of Chrysippus that: "At bottom, all acts of human will are the inevitable consequences of destiny."1 And Voltaire clearly affirms the truth of determinism in his explicit and characteristic language: "Liberty," said he, "is nothing else than to be able to do that which I desire... Your will is not free, but your actions are. You are free to act when you have the power to act."2

All these discussions, whether for or against free will, are based upon a priori arguments. To combat or defend determinism, the rational method was the only one employed. The introduction in science of the experimental and observational method has come to modify considerably the situation of the philosophers. The experiment has brought about a veritable overthrow of preconceived ideas since during the lust quarter of this century psycho-physiology has taken rank among the sciences.

The Greek and Latin philosophers, the fathers of the church, the doctors of the Reformation, and the philosophers of modern times based their opinions only upon their reason, whether they sustained or refuted free will. Now, facts observed, experimented upon, with the inevitable deductions, have come to throw light upon the problem. They enfeeble, reduce to nothing, the argumentation in support of free will, while sustaining, affirming, and imposing the doctrine of determinism. Even Fouillée, although impressed by philosophic classicism, has avowed that: "In the end, it is determinism which is true."3

Although positive science has demonstrated, and, in our opinion, without the possibility of refutation, that determinism is the truth, classic philosophy has always been for free will. It is this which is officially taught. Determinism is only spoken of to assert that it is false and to give an appearance of refuting it. Then, all or almost all of us have been nourished upon this idea that man possesses free will. This fact explains how difficult it is for us to divest our minds of this conception, which is false because it is in contradiction to all human phenomena. This impression upon our brains is such that a young advocate recently avowed: "Yes theoretically determinism is true; but practically it is not. It is sufficient to see the delinquents of the police court to be persuaded of it." The professional environment had thoroughly awakened in him the ideas received during his classical education. This prevented him from analysing to the end these delinquents, and consequently of perceiving their lack of free will.

What then is free will or moral liberty? By turns each of these different terms have been employed in the same sense.

In many parts of his dictionary Bayle gives us the explanation of free will (franc-arbitre).

This is the classical liberty of indifference
He writes: " Those who hold with free will properly so-called, admit in man the power to decide between turning to the right or to the left, even when the motives are perfectly equal as regards the two directions opposed; for they pretend that our spirit can say, without having other reason than to make use of its liberty: I like this better than that, although I see nothing more worthy of my choice in this than in that."1 And Bossuet, in his Traité du Libre arbitre has said that moral liberty belongs to man, because he can choose or not choose, without other motive than his own will. Also in the abstract of philosophy used in the preparation for the B.A. degree we read : "Moral liberty or free will is the liberty of our will in itself."2

This definition is somewhat obscure, and truly tautological. It indicates the necessity for a clear definition of will. Now, for this, the same abstract says : "Will is the power to decide, inherent in the human soul."3 Hence it results that free will is the liberty to be able to decide. In other words, free will is free will.

In his chapter 2 (p.22), Hamon argues that free will contradicts the natural laws of causality, that there are no effects without causes.
We have ascertained that there are no effects without causes. Innumerable observations, all testifying to the same fact, that no effect without causes, have led to the formulation of the law of natural causality. To defend the hypothesis of free will is to admit that quite a series of phenomena form an exception to this constant relationship, which is found to exist between any phenomenon and those in the process which precede it; it is to admit that a phenomenon is not the necessary effect of other preceding phenomena, or that an effect is without cause; that causes have their effect altered, modified by a "faculty" that one cannot conceive. Consequently to uphold free will is to suppose the existence of an inconceivable entity in contradiction even with the relation which unites phenomena with one another; the necessary relation of cause and effect. An hypothesis which explains nothing, but which implies something inconceivable, is useless and absurd. The observation of natural phenomena has led to the discovery that matter, force, and life subsist without being created and without being destroyed. This is the law of the conservation of matter (Lavoisier), of force (Mayer), and of life (Dreyer). Life is a mode of force. Force is not an entity. It is an attribute of matter.

Outside matter force cannot be conceived. Matter and force do not exist at all as separate entities. There is matter affected by movement, of which the infinitely various associations produce the infinitely different phenomena which we notice.

It is by mental abstraction that we denominate force that quality of matter which causes its combinations to be infinitely variable. Matter and force are then the same thing, for they are inseparable, inconceivable as distinct entities. One might then say The conservation of matter is a principle which results from the observation of all phenomena. Nothing is lost, nothing is created. Then the hypothesis of free will is in absolute contradiction to the law of the conservation of matter. In fact the hypothesis of free will forces one to admit something come from we know not whence, emanating from we know not what, something which would prevent or modify the manifestations of individual activity.

In his final chapter, pp. 134-136, Hamon concludes that moral responsibilitydoes not exist.
Universal determinism, being the scientific truth, it follows that moral responsibility does not exist. It cannot be conceived. It is, in fact, contrary to human reason to consider automatons responsible, being inevitably obliged to be as they are. The rock which in breaking away crnshed whoever is on. its path, is not considered responsible. Nor is the tiger responsible who kills a man. We ought no more consider the man who acts responsible, for he is as much an automaton as the tiger, or the rock. General irresponsibility, such is scientific truth.

It shocks even the convinced determinist.

Hamon notes that positivists maintain the right of society to defend itself, defining a kind of responsibility that comes from living in society (p.136).
Society, M. Ferri declares, has the right to defend and preserve itself. This is the

"sole positive ground for penal or defensive administration, apart from all idea of an ethico-religious or sentimental mission."

Man is responsible because he lives in society, and for no other cause than this social existence. He who does not live in society has no rights nor dnties. He renders account to nobody of his acts, at least without the idea of homage to some God.

"Man is responsible exclusively because in the life of society, every act produces effects and reactions, whether individual or social, which rebound upon the author of the act, and are useful or injurious to him, according as the action itself is useful or injurious to society." This social responsibility is upheld by the majority of psychologists, alienists, sociologists, and positive criminalists, such as Stuart Mill, Despine, Dally, Maudsley, Spencer, Lombroso, Lacassagne, Guyau, De Greet Le Bon, etc.

Every action produces reaction. Every agent therefore feels the natural and social consequences of his acts. He responds to them, and he is responsible for them vis-a-vis to the cosmic or social environment by the fact alone that he is the author of his acts. The positive Italian school arrives thus at responsibility based upon the simple attribution of fact. Such it was primitively. Logically with itself it transfers from the penal order to the civil order the general Anglo-Saxon conception which states with Holmes-

"that every man acts always at his own risk and peril, whatever may be the state of his conscience."

From this, lunatics, the insane of whatever kind, are considered by the positive school as socially responsible.

Hamon suggests we replace responsibility with reactivity, to describe what society must do when an individual provokes it (pp. 137-138).
The indivisual who commits acts disturbing the society in which he lives, necessarily provokes there a need for a reaction. This is fatal, inevitable. Individual or collective activity engenders individual or collective reactivity. To different modes of action respond various modes of reaction. We have no need of the conception of responsibility based upon free will, a liberty of intelligence which does not exist, based upon an individual identity of which it is impossible to establish a criterion. It is sufficient that there should be discord in action to produce the consequence whether of repression or prevention. The individual or social reactivity is the inevitable consequence of individual or social activity. It manifests itself by the proceedings for correction, preventive, or suppressive treatment if the acts resound in their surroundings, and if they have been judged injurious by the majority of the members of the society.

We consider then that it is necessary to substitute the term social reactivity for social responsibility, because the idea intended under the latter term does not correspond to the common classic idea of responsibility. Social reactivity has for its necessary product in place of penalties or chastisements, a preventive treatment, a hygiene and social therapeutics appealing further than to the agent, to the very causes of the discordant acts. This hygiene and this therapeutics of society we cannot yet treat of. We must first study the criminals, the etiology of crimes, and review the various present measures taken against criminals. Then alone we shall be able, knowing the cause, to establish a hygiene and social therapeutic. To-day it must suffice us to have shown that there is no such thing as moral responsibility, and that all men are irresponsible.

For Teachers
For Scholars
Notes

1.

Bibliography

Chapter 1.5 - The Philosophers Chapter 2.1 - The Problem of Knowledge
Home Part Two - Knowledge
Normal | Teacher | Scholar