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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
 
L. Susan Stebbing

L. Susan Stebbing was an analytic philosopher (she was a founder of the journal Analysis in 1933) and logical positivist. Her 1939 book Philosophy and the Physicists was a critical analysis of the idea that quantum indeterminacy was a proper basis for human freedom.

"The Physicists" referred to in the title were primarily Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington and
Sir James Jeans, two of the greatest science popularizers of the day. Stebbing felt that
they had an undeserved influence on popular opinion.

"They are not always reliable guides. Their influence has been considerable upon the reading public, upon theologians, and upon preachers; they have even misled philosophers who should have known better. Accordingly, it has seemed to me to be worth while to examine in some detail the philosophical views that they have put forth and to criticize the grounds upon which these views are based.
(Philosophy and the Physicists, Dover, 1958, p. ix)
With delicious irony, Stebbing notes that for many years physicists had claimed that deterministic laws could explain everything about the universe and its contents, even the human mind. Suddenly, the same men were saying that, on the contrary, the world could only be known probabilistically.
"Undoubtedly the bearing of the Law of Universal Causation ' (to use a favourite nineteenth-century phrase) is a problem much in evidence in the discussions of our philosophizing scientists. It is commonly admitted that at one time the scientists were informing us that 'free will' was an illusion, that we were all constrained to act — in whatever way we did in fact act; that if we were wicked, it couldn't be helped, and if we were good — well, that was nothing to be complaisant about. Nowadays, it is commonly supposed that these conclusions were premature, that if the biologists were compelled to deny to us freedom of action that was because they did not see sufficiently deeply into the constitution of matter;
It appears that Eddington never equated free electrons with free will.
But, as noted by Epicurus, they do break the chain of determinism.
now, however, the physicists have come to our rescue and have argued that, if an electron is 'free to choose' where it will go, surely a man may choose whether he will spend his summer holidays at Margate or at Wiesbaden, or whether he will propose to an heiress or remain a bachelor. Along with this proclamation of the rights of the intuition of free will, based somehow upon its being something other than an intuition — namely, a deliverance of consciousness in conformity with the most refined knowledge of the expert physicist — there goes an increasing reliance of the common reader upon the ability of the physicist to tell us what will happen to some one looking at the sun from the Cornish Coast on 11 August 1999, and what will happen to the non-combatants in the next world war.

"The situation is sufficiently curious. Upon the one hand we rely increasingly upon the scientist, biochemist, physiologist, and physicist, to tell us how to breed men and women for a 'brave new world' and what, if we disregard their advice, will happen to our descendants; on the other hand, we rejoice to be told that the physicist is less certain now than he was a few years ago that he does, or ever can, know what will happen. The position assigned to science in general, and to this or that particular scientist, is curious enough. We common readers continue to look up to them as the repository of knowledge and begin to regard them as the custodians of the spiritual element in the universe. They — or to speak more moderately some of them — have long aspired to the mantle of the prophets; now we thrust the mantle upon them. Theologians have, in the past, claimed to speak with a higher authority about higher things than those with which the scientist is concerned; now the theologians hang on to the mantles — or is it only the coats? — of the popularizing scientist. The situation does not lack an element of comedy.

Of course many scientists could not accept real indeterminacy. They included some of the greatest thinkers, including Max Planck, who proposed 1n 1900 the famous "quantum of action" h, Albert Einstein, who in 1905 showed that Planck's h implied that energies were indeed discrete or "quantized," and Erwin Schrödinger, whose 1926 equation of motion for the "wave-function" of atomic-scale objects remains deterministic until there is a "collapse of the wave function." It is this collapse or "reduction of the wave-packet" that introduces indeterminacy, and only on the microscopic atomic scale - unless it is "amplified" into the macroscopic world, for example by a Geiger counter.

Stebbing compares Planck, as an example of those scientists who say causal (deterministic) explanations are the very essence of science, with Eddington, who (along with Neils Bohr, Max Born, and Werner Heisenberg) accepted indeterministic "uncaused causes."

"The main point at issue between Planck and Eddington is, then, not whether the scientist believes that his procedure is rational or whether this belief springs merely from an ungrounded faith; it is whether a rational procedure must be based upon the assumption of deterministic laws. Planck says that it must be so based. Eddington says that it is not now so based. Although he is fond of calling attention to the modesty of this claim, he is not content with making it. Unfortunately he rashly adds that science does not offer a particle of evidence in favour of determinism. This statement surely requires some examination. For the purpose of such an examination it seems to me to be necessary to consider three closely connected questions. These questions are: (1) Is there any sense in which it is true to say that science has been based upon determinism?; (2) what is the connexion between determinism, prediction, and rationality?; (3) why should there be so much glee or so much gloom at the rejection of determinism? Perhaps it does not seem obvious that these questions are closely connected, but I think it will be found by no means easy to disentangle them in the discussions of the scientists with whom we are mainly concerned.

(1) We have already seen that scientists have certainly believed that science was based upon determinism. Moreover, were that not the case there would have been no occasion for rejoicing or mourning, nor could we have spoken of 'the decline of determinism'. Indeed, Eddington insists that the withdrawal of physical science from an attitude it had adopted consistently for more than 200 years is not to be treated lightly' (N.P.Sc. 73). But to say that 'science is based upon determinism' is to say that scientists have based their work upon determinism. There is no science apart from the minds of men. Accordingly, we can say loosely that science is based upon determinism, provided that the procedure of scientists has been deterministic and that no alternative to this procedure can be consistently carried through. But, if it be true that 'so far as we have yet gone in our probing of the material universe, we find no evidence in favour of determinism', it must be concluded that the work of earlier scientists has been based upon an illusion. This is, indeed, what Eddington wishes to maintain. I think that there is a sense in which it is true, but to describe the acceptance of determinism as the acceptance of an illusion is, I believe, more misleading than helpful.

Stebbing takes issue with Eddington's basic idea that the indeterminacy of electrons, making them "free to choose," in any way helps with human freedom. "Although the door of human freedom is opened," she quotes Eddington as saying, "it is not flung wide open; only a chink of daylight appears." She asks, "How is the door to be prised open wide enough to let in the full daylight?" (p. 215)
"I cannot help thinking that Eddington is on the wrong tack in trying to rest any part of the case for the freedom of man upon the present acceptance of indeterminism in physics....his argument may perhaps be stated as follows: If previous physical events completely determine all the movements of my body, then the movements of my pen are also completely determined by previous physical events. But the movements of my pen express the results of those mental processes that we call reasoning and seeking for truth. But if the movements of my pen are completely determined by previous physical events, how can it be held that my mental processes have anything to do with the movements made by my pen. And if my mental processes have nothing to do with the movements of my pen, how can we explain the importance attached to those movements of my pen which record what is true? This argument seems to Eddington to explain reasoning away, and to make of it a process quite other than he feels it to be. I agree that there is a difficulty; it is the difficulty of the gap between conscious processes and physical events.
If neither determinism nor indeterminism, this becomes the standard argument against free will

But surely Eddington's merely negative contention that such bodily processes are not completely predetermined by previous physical events does not remove the difficulty. This may be necessary; it is certainly not sufficient. I do not think that it can reasonably be maintained that physical indeterminism is capable of affording any help in this problem.
For Teachers
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Notes

1.

Bibliography

Chapter 1.4 - The Philosophy Chapter 1.6 - The Scientists
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