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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
 
Saul Smilansky

Saul Smilansky is an Illusionist, that is to say, he believes libertarian free will is incoherent and thus impossible and an illusion.

He is close to a group of thinkers who share a view that William James would have called "hard determinism," including Richard Double, Ted Honderich, Derk Pereboom, Galen Strawson, and the psychologist Daniel Wegner. Strawson was his thesis advisor at Oxford.

Smilansky believes that we typically have some "compatibilist free will," and that this often matters. Unlike Honderich and Pereboom, he also believes in compatibilist free will-based desert, and that compatibilist distinctions are central for moral and personal life. He calls for the establishment of a "Community of Responsibility" based upon the compatibilist distinctions.

He thinks that illusion matters a great deal in the free will problem, and that the illusion of libertarian free will is arguably positive, and probably even morally necessary.

Smilansky argues, somewhat dialectically, for a "Fundamental Dualism," that accepts both compatibilism and incompatibilism (viz., of moral responsibility with determinism). He calls himself a "compatibilist-dualist."

Smilansky suggests three questions for consideration:

1. Is there libertarian free will? This can be called the libertarian Coherence or Existence Question. Libertarians of course think that there is libertarian free will, compatibilists (typically) and hard determinists disagree. This first question is metaphysical or ontological, or perhaps logical.

2. If there is no libertarian free will, are we still in a reasonably good moral condition? This can be called the Compatibility Question; namely, are moral responsibility and related notions compatible with determinism (or with the absence of libertarian free will irrespective of determinism)? Compatibilism and hard determinism are opponents on the Compatibility Question. This question, in my opinion, is mostly ethical. The first proposal that I offer, Fundamental Dualism, relates to this second question, that of compatibility.

3. I offer pessimistic answers to the first two questions. In response to question 1, I claim that there is no libertarian free will, and in response to question 2, that compatibilism is insufficient. This leads to a third question: What are the consequences of the undoing of both libertarianism and (in part) compatibilism? I call this the Consequences Question, and its nature turns out to be complex. My second proposal, Illusionism on free will, relates to this third question of consequences.
(Free Will, Fundamental Dualism, and the Centrality of Illusion, in Oxford Handbook of Free Will, 2002, p. 490)

Smilansky calls it the "Assumption of Monism" to think that one must affirm either compatibilism or incompatibilism. This is what Ted Honderich calls the third mistake of the compatibilists and incompatibilists, that one or the other of them must be true.

Smilansky calls it his "Fundamental Dualism" to hold a mixed position including both. (Note that this dualism has nothing to do with great dualisms like mind/body.)

It seems to me that a harmful Assumption of Monism has seriously impaired the debate about free will at this point, and this Assumption of Monism helps explain why an explicit dualism such as I am presenting has not been previously developed. The Assumption of Monism is the assumption that ... one must affirm compatibilism or incompatibilism. In fact, there is no conceptual basis whatsoever for thinking that the Assumption of Monism is necessary. Compatibilism and incompatibilism are indeed logically inconsistent, but it is possible to hold a mixed, intermediate position that is not fully consistent with either. The Compatibility Question might be answered in a yes-and-no fashion, for there is no conceptual reason why it should not be the case that certain forms of moral responsibility require libertarian free will while other forms could be sustained without it. There is nothing to prevent incompatibilists and compatibilists from insisting that real moral responsibility does, or does not, require libertarian free will. But their case must be made in ethical terms, and it may well turn out that there is no single or exhaustive notion of moral responsibility. (p. 491)
In addition to his Fundamental Dualism, Smilansky also proposes his Illusionism.
The Fundamental Dualism, according to which we must be both compatibilists and hard determinists, was my first proposal. Now let us move on to the second. Illusion, I claim, is the vital but neglected key to the free will problem. I am not saying that we need to induce illusory beliefs concerning free will or can live with beliefs that we fully realize are illusory. Both of these positions would be highly implausible. Rather, I maintain that illusory beliefs are in place, and that the role they play is largely positive. (p. 497)

Illusionism is the position that illusion often has a large and positive role to play in the issue of free will. In arguing for the importance of illusion, I claim that we can see why it is useful, that it is a reality, and why by and large it ought to continue to be so. Illusory beliefs are in place concerning free will and moral responsibility, and the role they play is largely positive. Humanity is fortunately deceived on the free will issue, and this seems to be a condition of civilized morality and personal value.

The sense of "illusion" that I am using combines the falsity of a belief with some motivated role in forming and maintaining that belief—as in standard cases of wishful thinking or self-deception. However, it suffices that the beliefs are false and that this conclusion would be resisted were a challenge to arise. It is not necessary for us to determine the current level of illusion concerning free will.

The importance of illusion flows in two ways from the basic structure of the free will problem: first, indirectly, from the Fundamental Dualism on the Compatibility Question — the partial and varying validity of both compatibilism and hard determinism . Second, illusion flows directly and more deeply from the meaning of the very absence of the grounding that libertarian free will was thought to provide. We cannot live adequately with the dissonance of the two valid sides of the Fundamental Dualism, nor with a complete awareness of the deep significance of the absence of libertarian free will. We have to face the fact that there are basic beliefs that morally ought not to be abandoned, although they might destroy each other, or are even partly based on incoherent conceptions. At least for most people, these beliefs are potentially in need of motivated mediation and defense by illusion, ranging from wishful thinking to self-deception.

Smilansky concludes...
There is no libertarian free will: people can have limited forms of local control over their actions, but not the deep form of libertarian free will. Whether determinism is completely true or not, we cannot make sense of the sort of constitutive self-transcendence that would provide grounding for the deep sense of moral responsibility that libertarian free will was thought to supply. Our common libertarian assumptions cannot be sustained. All our actions, however an internalized and complex a form they may take, are the result of what we are, ultimately beyond our control.

The implications of the absence of libertarian free will are complex, and the standard assumption of the debate, the Assumption of Monism according to which we must be either compatibilists or hard determinists, is false. We saw why "forms of life" based on the compatibilist distinctions about control are possible and morally required but are also superficial and deeply problematic in ethical and personal terms. I claimed that the most plausible approach to the Compatibility Question is a complex compromise, which I called "Fundamental Dualism." The idea that either compatibilism or hard determinism can be adequate on its own is untenable.

There is then partial nonillusory grounding for many of our central free will-related beliefs, reactions, and practices, even in a world without libertarian free will. But in various complex ways, we require illusion in order to bring forth and maintain them. Illusion is seen to flow from the basic structure of the free will issue, the absence of libertarian free will, and the Fundamental Dualism concerning the implications. Revealing the large and mostly positive role of illusion concerning free will not only teaches us a great deal about the free will issue itself but also posits illusion as a pivotal factor in human life.

In his 2000 book Free Will and Illusion, Smilansky discussed various attempts to defend libertarian free will, by C. A. Campbell, Roderick Chisholm, David Wiggins, and Robert Kane.
here Smilansky states concisely the Determinism Objection and the Randomness Objection to free will
Having set aside various irrelevant or false moves, we may now turn to the proper investigation of the libertarian case. The crucial question is the Coherence Question: namely, is the conception of libertarian free will coherent? This means that we are looking for formulations of libertarian free will which go beyond 'ordinary' determinism and random micro-particle indeterminism, for neither provides the basis of a libertarian conception of free will and moral responsibility.

In pursuit of such a 'third way' libertarians tend to limit their case in various ways: first, only some of a person's actions (decisions, choices) are said to be in libertarian terms free. Secondly, in any situation where the choice is considered free, the number of alternatives strictly available to the agent is limited. Such limitations create no immediate difficulties for this discussion. However, the problems begin when, within these limitations, a picture of the free (and moral responsibility meriting) choice or action is constructed.

A worthwhile libertarian model would provide a foundation for the central intuitions incompatibilists miss, with the best theoretical tools compatibilism can supply. One of the reasons why the desperateness of the libertarian case has not been overwhelmingly recognized is that often the basic ethical intuitions that a libertarian model should defend have not been set out with sufficient clarity in presentation of the models themselves. Once this is done, the impossibility of libertarian free will should become apparent.

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