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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
 
Jules Lequyer
Jules Lequyer was a French theologian and philosopher who anticipated much of today's "open theism, the idea that the future of the universe is "open," that God's foreknowledge at best knows about multiple alternative possibilities.

In particular, perhaps influenced by Calcidius, the 4th-century translator of Plato's Timaeus, with its description of creation ex nihilo, Lequyer argued that human beings are creative only if they are free to choose among those future possibilities.

Although Cicero had translated some of the Timaeus, Calcidius' Latin translation was the only known source into medieval scholasticism, so it influenced religious thought through the nineteenth century, including especially Lequyer and the German thinkers Gustav Fechner and Otto Pfliederer, both of whom argued that God could not know the future and also have power over it.

The idea that "God cannot change his Mind" was the source for Augustinian and Calvinist determinism, even if scripture explicitly says "amend your ways and the Lord will repent the evil that he hath pronounced against you." (Jeremiah 26:13)

Anselm was an exception. In his Concordium on Free Will, objected to determinism because something eternal is immutable, but something in time is mutable.
The familiar idea of God as an omniscient and omnipotent being has an internal logical contradiction that is rarely discussed by theologians. If such a being had perfect knowledge of the future, like Laplace’s demon, who knows the positions, velocities, and forces for all the particles, it would be perfectly impotent. Because if God has the power to change even one thing about the future, his presumed perfect knowledge would have been imperfect.

Omniscience entails impotence. Omnipotence some ignorance. Prayer is useless.

As to omnibenevolence, Archibald MacLeish said in J.B, “If God is Good, He is not God. If God is God, He is Not Good.”

Lequyer's connection of freedom to human creativity "to make, and in making, to make ourselves," is the core insight of information philosophy. Creativity, the generation of new information in the universe, whether a quantum measurement or a new idea, must involve indeterminism

Information is neither matter nor energy, although it needs matter to be embodied and energy to be communicated. Why should it become the preferred basis for all philosophy?

As most all of us know, matter and energy are conserved. This means that there is just the same total amount of matter and energy today as there was at the universe origin.

But then what accounts for all the change that we see, the new things under the sun? It is information, which is not conserved and has been increasing since the beginning of time, despite the second law of thermodynamics, with its increasing entropy, which destroys order.

What is changing is the arrangement of the matter into what we can call information structures. What is emerging is new information. What idealists and holists see is that emergence of immaterial information.

Living things, you and I, are dynamic growing information structures, forms through which matter and energy continuously flow. And it is information processing that controls those flows!

At the lowest levels, living information structures blindly replicate their information. At higher levels, natural selection adapts them to their environments. At the highest levels, living things develop behaviors, intentions, goals, and agency, introducing purpose into the universe.

Information is the modern spirit, the ghost in the machine, the mind in the body. It is the soul, and when we die, it is our information that perishes, unless the future preserves it. The matter remains.

Lequyer was a great influence on Charles Renouvier and William James, perhaps indirectly on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, and on the idea of emergence, that new things are constantly being created, including what William Hasker calls the "emergent self."

Without such a self-creation, moral philosophers question the existence of responsibility for our actions.

Excerpt from "Hornbeam Leaf."
One day, in my father’s garden, at the moment of taking a hornbeam leaf, I suddenly marveled at feeling myself to be the absolute master of this action, insignificant though it was. To do or not to do! both so equally within my power! A single cause, me, capable at a single instant, as though I were double, of two completely opposite effects! and, by one, or by the other, author of something eternal, for whatever my choice, it would henceforth be eternally true that something would have taken place at this point of time that it had pleased me to decide. I was not equal to my astonishment; I drew back, I recovered, my heart beating precipitously.

I was going to put my hand on the branch, and create in good faith, without knowing it, a mode of being, when I raised my eyes and paused at a slight noise coming from the foliage. A frightened bird had taken flight. To fly away was to perish. A sparrow hawk passing by seized it in midair.

I am the one who had handed it over, I said to myself with sadness. The caprice which made me touch this branch and not another had caused its death...

But what if this present determination, rather than initiating a train of events, merely continues the past train of events by an other, from long ago certain for some being superior to me, and occurring in its time in this general order that I have not in any way made? If I seem sovereign in my innermost heart, was this at base, to not feel my dependence? What if each of my acts of will was an effect before being a cause, so that this choice, this free choice, this choice that is apparently as free as chance, might have really been (having in it nothing of chance) the inevitable consequence of an anterior choice, and that choice the consequence of another, and always the same, to trace backward to times of which I had no memory? This weighed in my spirit like the dawn full of sadness of the coming day. An idea . . . Ah! what an idea! What a vision! I am fascinated by it....

I understood the fallacy of muttering these ridiculous words at the moment of acting: Let us ponder, let us see what I am going to do Were I to seriously reflect, I would no more succeed in becoming the author of my acts by means of my reflections than my reflections by means of my reflections; if I was occasionally overrun by the feeling of my power—for I have yet the feeling of my own power—it is only the feeling of its passage in me and it submerges me in its waves, the power employed to hold together this universal ebb and flow. I knew that, not being my own principle, I was the principle of nothing. I knew that my defect and my weakness were to have been made. I knew that whoever had been made, had been made stripped of the noble faculty of making. I knew that the sublime, the miracle as well, alas! the impossible, was to act: no matter where within me and no matter how, but to act; to give a first push, to will a first act of will, to begin something in some fashion (of what might I have been capable if 1 might have been capable of something!), to act, one time, entirely of my own authority, that is to say to act. And feeling, by the pain of losing the illusion, the joy that one would have had to possess so beautiful a privilege, I found myself reduced to the role of spectator, by turns amused and saddened by a changing tableau which took shape in me without me, and which, sometimes faithful and sometimes lying, showed me, under the appearances ever equivocal, both myself and the world, to me always credulous, and always powerless to suspect my present error or to regain the truth. There was only this truth, now so clear to my eyes, of my invincible powerlessness to ever defeat any error, if by another error, I tried any useless and inevitable effort. A single idea, a single idea, reverberated everywhere, a single sun with uniform rays: what I had done was necessary. This that I think is necessary. The absolute necessity for that which is to be at the instant and in the manner that it is, with this formidable consequence: good and evil confounded, equal, fruits born of the same sap and the same stalk. At this idea, which repulsed my entire being I uttered a cry of distress and terror. The leaf fell from my hands, and as though I had touched the tree of knowledge, I lowered my head and wept.

Suddenly I raised it again. Recovering my faith in my freedom by my freedom itself, without reasoning, without hesitation, without any other gauge of the excellence of my nature than this inner testimony that makes my soul created in the image of God and capable of resisting him, since it should obey him, I said to myself, in the security of a superb solitude: This is not so, I am free.

And the chimera of necessity disappeared, similar to the phantoms formed during the night by a play of shadow and light from the hearth, which immobilize the child with fear under their flamboyant eyes, who is woken with a start, still half lost in a dream. Accomplice to the magic spell, he ignores the fact that he held it together himself by the fixity of his point of view, but as soon as he doubts it, he dispels it with a glance upon the first movement that he dares to make.

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