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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
 
Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
Isaiah Berlin
Bernard Berofsky
Susanne Bobzien
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Carneades
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Diodorus Cronus
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
René Descartes
Richard Double
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Fred Dretske
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
John Martin Fischer
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouillée
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Michael Frede
Carl Ginet
H.Paul Grice
Nicholas St. John Green
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
William James
Lord Kames
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
Jaegwon Kim
William King
Christine Korsgaard
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Leucippus
Michael Levin
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
John Locke
Michael Lockwood
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
James Martineau
Storrs McCall
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Paul E. Meehl
Alfred Mele
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Friedrich Nietzsche
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
Karl Popper
H.A.Prichard
Hilary Putnam
Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
Ayn Rand
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
C.W.Rietdijk
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
T.M.Scanlon
Moritz Schlick
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
L. Susan Stebbing
George F. Stout
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
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
William Whewell
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists
Ishtiyaque Haji
Ishtiyaque Haji has developed an enormous number of Frankfurt-style cases that exhibit puzzles about moral responsibility. He presents the standard argument against free will and moral responsibility and then suggests that this "age-old grand puzzle" might be more tractable if we consider a more restrictive form of "responsibility" that he calls "appraisability".

Appraisability apparently grows out of Peter Strawson's notion of the "reactive attitudes" of blame and praise that humans would feel whether or not determinism or free will is the case.

Haji explains "moral appraisability" by identifying actions that 1) we normally regard as free (he calls this "volitional control"), 2) actions that are performed autonomously (which he defines as issuing from an "authentic evaluative scheme"), and 3) actions that the agent regards as morally obligatory, right, or wrong. (Moral Appraisability, 1998, p. 237)

In his later work Deontic Morality and Control, Haji identifies these last three attributes as "deontic" properties. They make the acts deontic acts.

Haji says he has identified three conditions that are necessary and sufficient for moral appraisability for intentional actions.

The conditions are recorded in principle Appraisability, which has three central constituents: a control constituent, which says that the sort of control required for moral appraisability is volitional control; an epistemic one, which — stripped down to its core — says that in order for an agent to be morally appraisable for an action, the agent must believe she is doing something wrong or morally amiss, or she is either executing her moral duty or at least doing what is morally permissible by performing that action; and finally, an authenticity constituent, which says that the agent's action for which she is appraisable must issue from actional springs that are "truly her own."
(Moral Appraisability, 1998, p. 237)
Like many of his modern colleagues, Haji is agnostic on the truth of determinism.
My last objective in this work is to motivate the suggestion that the three conditions laid down in the analysis of appraisability I defend are threatened neither by determinism nor by (certain varieties) of indeterminism. (p.viii)
While Haji focuses on morally appraisable actions, his work is not a form of restrictivism. He says it applies also to non-moral actions.
I suggest that the conditions registered in the analysis, with suitable amendments, capture conditions for nonmoral but other normative varieties of appraisability like etiquettical or prudential appraisability. One result of this exploration into varieties of appraisability that will undoubtedly strike many as controversial is that, even if appraisability is not undermined either by determinism or indeterminism, most of us most of the time are not morally appraisable for what we do. (p.viii)
His condition that the agent must believe she is doing something wrong, right, or obligatory implies that others not sharing that belief will make mistakes assigning praise or blame.
I discuss the implications of the analysis for what I dub "intersocietal" attributions of blameworthiness: people who are not part of a particular culture — "outsiders" relative to a culture — often attribute blame to a person within that culture for doing something regarded as morally repulsive by the outsiders. Relying on the epistemic element of my analysis — that blameworthiness requires belief in what is wrong (and not "objective" wrongness) — I argue that outsiders' attributions of blame are probably frequently erroneous. (p.viii)
Haji accepts that agents lacking control for reasons of addiction, hypnosis, manipulation, etc. are not morally appraisable. But then, in a surprise, he thinks agents are morally appraisable for their thoughts and even dreams. Note that in our two-stage model of free will, thoughts are the result of alternative possibilities generated in part indeterministically.
Falling back partly on conclusions I draw regarding appraisability for unconscious thoughts, I argue that we can be appraisable for some of the thoughts of our dream selves (at least if dreams are experiences involving mental activity). (p.viii)
Haji on Modest Libertarianism
In his book Deontic Morality and Control, Haji extensively examines Alfred Mele's proposal for a Modest Libertarianism.
In Mele's theory indeterminacy in the actional pathway leading to an agent's decision or other sort of action occurs relatively early at the juncture between the agent's deliberations about what to do and the formation of a best judgment regarding what to do (Mele 1995: ch. 12). In standard nondeviant cases of intentional action, the agent decides on the basis of such judgment, say, to perform some action and then acts accordingly, intentionally performing the action. It is the best judgments, on this view, that are undetermined. I argue that this sort of modest libertarianism, even if it accommodates some deontic morality, accommodates far too little. (p.89)

Indeterminism at the decision stage invites the randomness objection of the standard argument, which Mele calls the Luck Objection
Next, I turn to a more robust form of modest R-libertarianism in which indeterminacy is located relatively late in the pathway, culminating in action at the juncture between, roughly, the consideration of reasons and the formation of intentions or the making of decisions. Here, it is the intentions or decisions that are undetermined. My verdict will be that this more robust form of libertarianism is hospitable to deontic morality.

However, prior to being in a position to draw this verdict, a serious hurdle I previously thought could not be overcome (see Haji 1999a) will have to be cleared. It has been charged that the more robust version of R-libertarianism that I have distinguished succumbs to a powerful objection: In brief, if our choices are indeterministically caused, and it is the very intentions or decisions that are undetermined, then our choices are a matter of luck.

Even in a two-stage deliberation-decision process, Mele notes that random alternative possibilities are a matter of luck
For holding constant the conditions of the past that include the agent's powers, values, deliberations, and character, the agent could have made one choice just as easily as she could have made another. Moreover, with nothing about the agent's capacities, states of mind, reasons for action, and so on rationalizing this difference in outcome —as would be the case if the past were held fixed — the difference in outcome does seem to be a matter of luck. Luck of this sort appears to be incompatible with responsibility.

I will argue that this luck objection does in fact have bite. This concession may seem suicidal to the project of accommodating deontic morality by appealing to elements of a robust modest R-libertarian theory. For luck, it appears, is not only incompatible with responsibility, it is incompatible with deontic morality as well. How could one, for example, do moral wrong if all of one's actions were luck infected and so, it would seem, out of one's control?

John Martin Fischer criticized Daniel Dennett's "Valerian" proposal which adds indeterminism to the early stages of deliberation in order to enhance control. Fischer called it alchemy. He clearly thought it reduced control. Haji notes the same criticism applies to Mele, but he denies Fischer's claim of alchemy.

To respond to Fischer's charge of alchemy — the charge that adding indeterminacy as to which belief states will come to mind in an otherwise deterministic sequence that, without the added indeterminacy, would be considered by the libertarian to be one in which an agent lacks control — it will be helpful to remind ourselves, once again, of Mele's distinction between proximal and ultimate control. The former, as we have seen, concerns the direct causal production of agent-involving events. The latter, in contrast, involves the causal influence of agent-external events. In order for an agent S to have ultimate control over an event, say, S's x-ing at a time t, where x-ing might, for example, be the making of a decision, there must be no time at which there are minimally causally sufficient conditions that do not include events or states internal to S, for S's x-ing at t. In other words, to have ultimate control over S's making some decision, roughly, there shouldn't be conditions "external" to S that are minimally causally sufficient for S's making that decision. Hence, agents could have ultimate control over their actions only if determinism is false. But proximal control, according to Mele, is compatible with determinism (1995: 211).

Modest libertarians should not deny that an entirely deterministic "actional process" is one in which an agent lacks proximal control but need only deny that it is one in which the agent lacks ultimate control. Indeed, Mele insists that satisfaction of his compatibilist conditions for autonomous or responsible action, along with the proximal control that that involves, together with doxastic indeterminism, suffices for the agent's having ultimate control over the pertinent action. On his view, then, as he says, ultimate control, rather than requiring the possession of any special "control power" beyond the powers required for satisfaction of compatibilist conditions for responsible action, "is something one has in virtue of satisfying the compatibilist conditions and being suitably internally indeterministic" (1995: 213). Transformation of a deterministic actional process from one of lack of ultimate control to one containing such control by installation of the sort of internal indeterminacy that Mele recommends, should, consequently, not smack of alchemy.

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Bibliography

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