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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
 
Michael A. Smith
Michael Smith is a moral philosopher who specializes in meta-ethics, an investigation of the preconditions of everyday normative ethics. In a 1987 Mind article, The Humean Theory of Motivation, Smith defended the claims of David Hume that actions can only be motivated by desires (Hume called them the "Passions"), and not by mere reasons, which are sets of beliefs (possibly "true") about facts in the world.

Smith reads Hume as claiming that motivation has its source in a relevant desire and the agent's beliefs about means and ends that could achieve the goal desired.

Anti-Humeans or Non-Humeans (who tend to be Kantians) find the source of normative behavior in the reasons themselves, which are taken to be objective facts in the world. They stress "reasons-responsiveness." Of course, reasoning about the world might lead to an intention or a desire to change it.

Whereas Hume the Skeptic is famous for the fact/value distinction and the claim that we cannot derive "ought" from "is" (no facts of the matter lead logically to norms or the way things "should be"), Hume the Naturalist accepts many human beliefs and desires. For example, his skepticism leads to the conclusion that we cannot logically prove the existence of causality. But we have a natural belief in causality and the existence of the external world.

In his 1994 book The Moral Problem, Smith argues that moral arguments are a species of rational arguments. He says it is a distinctive feature of practical morality that the participants want to get the answers to moral questions "right". This gives rise to the meta-ethical question about the objective existence of correct answers to moral questions.

Information philosophy regards all normative moral reasoning to be relative to a culture, or at best to living systems, so normative moral reasons are arrived at by inter-subjective agreement within a culture. Moral facts are not "right" or "true" apart from the community holding them.

Smith contrasts the "objectivity of moral judgement" (p.6), which he agrees is merely a convergence of moral opinions, with the "practicality" of moral judgement (p.7), which are opinions about reasons for our behavior, which in turn are motivations for our actions.

The first, "objectivity" view, is committed to the existence of moral facts among the various facts in the world. (Information philosophy, and Quine for example, sees science as the standard for objective facts in the world.)

The second, "practicality" view, is simply that we find ourselves motivated by a desire to act, and usually with a belief about the means and ends needed to achieve our goal, if need be changing the world to fit our desires.

R. Jay Wallace (in his 1990 Mind article How to Argue about Practical Reason, reprinted in his book The Normativity of the Will) cites Smith for the teleological argument that goal-directed states of mind (intentions to act) require more than rational principles. Specifically, the intentional state is more than a rational representation of the current content of the world. It is a desire to change the world to fit the goal. (This is reminiscent of Marx's famous comment on the eleventh thesis of Feuerbach, "The point is not merely to understand the world, but to change it.")

Wallace says that Smith's argument is extremely straightforward and conforms to what Wallace calls the "desire-out, desire-in" principle.

Smith's own presentation of his position is succinct enough to be quoted virtually in its entirety:
A motivated desire is a desire had for a reason; that is, a desire the having of which furthers some goal that the agent has. The agent's having this goal is, in turn, inter alia, the state that constitutes the motivating reason that he has for having the desire.... But if the state that motivates the desire is itself a reason, and the having of this reason is itself constituted by his having a goal, then, given that the having of a goal is a state with which the world must fit rather than vice versa . . . , so it follows ... that the state that motivates the desire must itself be a desire. Thus, the Humean will say, the idea that there may be a state that motivates a desire, but which is not itself a desire, is simply implausible.
The structure of this argument is extremely straightforward. A motivated desire, Smith notes, is one that is explicable in terms of reasons. But reason explanations are essentially teleological, attributing a goal to the person who has the reason; and to have a goal is already to be in a state of desire. Of course that further desire may itself be motivated by a reason, but simple iteration of Smith's teleological argument suffices to show that the chain of explanations must eventually terminate in an unmotivated desire.
(Normativity and the Will, p.33)

In a 1990 essay written with Philip Pettit (Backgrounding Desire), Smith argues that while desires are always present in the genesis of human action, the agent might not consciously reflect on the desire. It may be in the background of decision-making and not apparent in deliberations. Beliefs tht function as means-ends reasons for action may also often be in the unconscious background of deliberations. Pettit and Smith see many analogies between desires and beliefs.

In a 1993 essay (Practical Unreason), Pettit and Smith argue that human beings have alternative possibilities for deliberation and action.

Human beings, we assume, are deliberative agents. As they face a choice, they are capable of registering considerations relevant, by their own lights, to what should be done: thus they can register that these are the alternative options and those the associated possible outcomes, that one option has this set of desirable features, another a different set, and so on. They are capable, furthermore, of registering that the considerations overall support one or another choice: they can recognize the import of the desirable features registered. And they are capable, finally, of being moved by such a pattern of reasoning: they are capable of making this or that choice in response to the recognition that it is the most strongly supported alternative.

That humans have such alternative possibilities appears to conflict with Pettit's and Smith's views on free will. They are both compatibilist determinists. To escape the conflict, they argue that humans are free to do otherwise if it would avoid doing some wrong. It makes no sense, they say, to have a freedom to do something that is not right. They give up on the ideal of autonomy or "self-rule" in favor of what they called in their earlier essays "orthonomy" or right rule.

This appears to be an amalgam of ancient views that freedom consists of doing the moral thing (Aquinas, Kant) or doing the rational thing (Wolf).

Information philosophy regards these views as errors that we call the ethical fallacy and the rational fallacy.

As Pettit and Smith write in their 1996 essay (Freedom in Belief and Desire)

We want to show why the account of responsible believing and desiring ... is, precisely, an account of how responsible believers and desirers can enjoy freedom in the matter of what they believe and of what they desire and do. Responsibility or orthonomy in belief means that people enjoy free thought. Responsibility or orthonomy in desire means that people enjoy free will.

Freedom in the sense associated with free will is traditionally defined in terms of the ability of the agent, for anything they do, always to have done otherwise. A believer or desirer would be free in this sense to the extent that no matter what he believes or desires, he is such that he could always have believed and he could always have desired otherwise. Freedom in such an unqualified sense if, indeed, it deserves to be called 'freedom' at all — would not be particularly attractive from our point of view. If an agent believes or desires rightly according to the evidence and the values, then there will be nothing attractive in itself about being such that he could have believed or desired otherwise. Believing or desiring otherwise will simply be a matter of his getting it wrong, and so doing much worse than he actually did. The ability to have believed or desired otherwise will be something inherently attractive from our point of view only so far as it is the person's ability for anything that is not rightly believed or desired always to have believed or desired otherwise. We argue that responsible believers and desirers are free in the sense of having this ability.

This asymmetry between freedom - we have it when we correct our errors and act morally, we lack freedom when we do something irrational or immoral - echoes the asymmetry noted by Susan Wolf between blame and praise. We accept freedom and responsibility for our praiseworthy actions, but claim we are determined when we do something wrong.

This parallels another human weakness - to regard our victories in playing a game as due to our skills, but regard our failures as simply a matter of bad luck.

For Teachers
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Notes

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Bibliography

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