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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
Jeremy Butterfield
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Nancy Cartwright
Gregg Caruso
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Tom Clark
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
August Compte
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
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
Niels Henrik Gregersen
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
James Ladyman
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
Ernest Nagel
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
U.T.Place
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
John Duns Scotus
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
David Shiang
Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Peter Slezak
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
Xenophon

Scientists

David Albert
Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Marcello Barbieri
Jacob Barandes
Gregory Bateson
Horace Barlow
John S. Bell
Mara Beller
Charles Bennett
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Susan Blackmore
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
John Tyler Bonner
Emile Borel
Max Born
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Bothe
Jean Bricmont
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Daniel Brooks
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Melvin Calvin
William Calvin
Donald Campbell
Sadi Carnot
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Rudolf Clausius
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
Simon Conway-Morris
Peter Corning
George Cowan
Jerry Coyne
John Cramer
Francis Crick
E. P. Culverwell
Antonio Damasio
Olivier Darrigol
Charles Darwin
Paul Davies
Richard Dawkins
Terrence Deacon
Lüder Deecke
Richard Dedekind
Louis de Broglie
Stanislas Dehaene
Max Delbrück
Abraham de Moivre
David Depew
Bernard d'Espagnat
Paul Dirac
Hans Driesch
John Dupré
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Manfred Eigen
Albert Einstein
George F. R. Ellis
Walter Elsasser
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
Richard Feynman
R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
George Fox
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
Augustin-Jean Fresnel
Karl Friston
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
Ernst Haeckel
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
Grete Hermann
John Herschel
Basil Hiley
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Don Howard
John H. Jackson
Ray Jackendoff
Roman Jakobson
E. T. Jaynes
William Stanley Jevons
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
Werner Loewenstein
Hendrik Lorentz
Josef Loschmidt
Alfred Lotka
Ernst Mach
Donald MacKay
Henry Margenau
Owen Maroney
David Marr
Humberto Maturana
James Clerk Maxwell
John Maynard Smith
Ernst Mayr
John McCarthy
Warren McCulloch
N. David Mermin
George Miller
Stanley Miller
Ulrich Mohrhoff
Jacques Monod
Vernon Mountcastle
Emmy Noether
Donald Norman
Travis Norsen
Howard T. Odum
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
A.A. Roback
Emil Roduner
Juan Roederer
Robert Rosen
Frank Rosenblatt
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
Stanley Salthe
Robert Sapolsky
Tilman Sauer
Ferdinand de Saussure
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Erwin Schrödinger
Aaron Schurger
Sebastian Seung
Thomas Sebeok
Franco Selleri
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
Abner Shimony
Herbert Simon
Dean Keith Simonton
Edmund Sinnott
B. F. Skinner
Lee Smolin
Ray Solomonoff
Roger Sperry
John Stachel
Kenneth Stanley
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
Robert Ulanowicz
C. S. Unnikrishnan
Nico van Kampen
Francisco Varela
Vlatko Vedral
Vladimir Vernadsky
Clément Vidal
Mikhail Volkenstein
Heinz von Foerster
Richard von Mises
John von Neumann
Jakob von Uexküll
C. H. Waddington
James D. Watson
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
August Weismann
Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
Jeffrey Wicken
Wilhelm Wien
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wiley
E. O. Wilson
Günther Witzany
Carl Woese
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
Semir Zeki
Ernst Zermelo
Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky

Presentations

Biosemiotics
Free Will
Mental Causation
James Symposium
Evo Devo Scholar Talk
CCS25 Talk
 
Robert Ulanowicz

Robert E. Ulanowicz, a theoretical ecologist and philosopher, was a professor of theoretical ecology at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, and now is in the Department of Biology at the University of Florida.

In his 1997 book Ecology, The Ascendent Perspective, Ulanowicz introduces an index, or measure, of processes in ecology describable as constraints in flow networks between "compartments." He writes...

[W]e define as the most indeterminate network of flows one in which each compartment contributes to and receives from all compartments in proportion to the fraction of the total system throughput [later TST]. The amount by which any given flow deviates from maximal indeterminacy defines its contribution to the information of the network under study...

Summing all the contributions [from each flow] results in what is called the average mutual information (AMI) of the flow structure. AMI measures the average amount of constraint upon an ordinary quantum of currency in passing from one compartment to the next...

The resulting product of TST times the network AMI we call the "ascendency" of the system...

In the absence of overwhelming external disturbances, living systems exhibit a natural propensity to increase in ascendency.

In a recent work, Process Ecology: Making Room for Creation, Ulanowicz writes...

The laws of physics, because they are cast in terms of homogeneous variables, fall short of determining outcomes in heterogeneous biological systems that are capable of an immense number of combinatoric changes. The universal laws are not violated and they continue to constrain, but specification of results is accomplished instead by stable configurations of processes that develop in a nonrandom, but indeterminate manner. The indeterminacy of physical laws puts an end to Deist speculations and necessitates an alternative to the mechanical-reductionistic metaphor for nature. An antithetical Heraclitan metaphysics, called ‘Process Ecology,’ entails a dialectic between centripetal creation and centrifugal decay in which nature, humanity and the Divine can all potentially participate. The dialectic can be quantified and tracked using information measures applied to networks of processes to allow for the statement and testing of falsifiable hypotheses. Creation no longer appears as an emergent enigma, but rather as a core phenomenon of Process Ecology that allows for free will, Divine intervention, intercessory prayer and a necessary tolerance for petty evil. No longer is ‘heat death’ the inevitable and only endpoint of the cosmos. Rather, the course of the universe may include as well the production of ‘perpetual harmonies’ akin to Teilhard’s ‘Omega Point.’

In the dialogue between science and religion many exchanges between physicists and theologians are aimed at papering over the yawning gap between their respective metaphysics, as though it does not exist. While biologists do enter the conversation, most do so as physicalists, believing that all sciences are derivative of physics. Physicists, of course, are delighted to encourage this belief—witness the opinion shared by Nobel Laureates Murray Gell-Mann and David Gross, who maintain that all causality originates from below and that there is nothing ‘down there’ but the laws of physics (Kauffman 2008).

Such nihilism is the trademark of those who deny the authenticity of anything theological. Encouraged by the absence of any violations of the four force laws of physics (strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism and gravity), Carl Sagan and Hawking (1988) sought to seize the entire domain of metaphysics with their belief that ‘There is nothing left for a Creator to do.’ So cowed are many believers by the power of physics and the other sciences that even a believer like Hefner (2000) came to doubt that miracles can happen, lamenting that God ‘just doesn’t have enough “wiggle room”.’ Many who still pray have abandoned intercessory prayer in the Neo-Deist belief that God cannot act in a world totally ruled by the laws of science. Truly, a metaphysical chasm persists between physics and theology.

In his 2009 book, A Third Window; Natural Life Beyond Newton and Darwin, Ulanowicz reviews "average mutual information (AMI)"

AMI is a measure of how well organized or determinate a configuration of relationships appears, as will be elaborated in thee chapters that follow. The mathematical form of the mutual information resembled a familiar quantity from thermodynamics called the Gibbs-Helmholtz free energy, which was consructed to measure how much work a system could possibly perform. The problem was that the AMI, coming as it did from information theory, carried no physical dimensions; it could not indicate the size of the system to which it was being applied. In order to maintain the parallel with thermodyamics, I needed to impart the dimensions of work to the AMI. Perhaps the simplest way of doing this was to scale (multiply) the AMI by the total activity (sum of all flows [TST]) inherent in the ecosystem.

The resulting product I called the system's ascendency because it represented the coherent power a system could bring to bear in ordering itself and the world around it. Over the course of the following two weeks, I tested how well the measure could mimic various facets of organization. I was excited to discover that the index nicely encapsulated almost all the major attributes that Eugene Odum (1969) had used to characterize more "mature" or developed ecosystems. That is, increasing ascendency appeared to descnbe quantitatively both the growth and development of ecosystems. As it turned out, 1 finally had formulated a phenomenological statement around which to configure my accumulated renegade observations.

I soon became aware of my inability to devise any explanation by which ecosystem development in the guise of increasing ascendency could be explained fully in terms of the actions of its individual parts. It gradually dawned upon me that the tenet of increasing ascendency, like the second law before it, directly challenges the prevailing mechanical view of the world. My readings in thermodynamics had alerted me to the fact that, in any confrontation between phenomenology and theory, theory remains at risk, until it can be otherwise supported. Having not yet formulated a coherent theory to elucidate the rise of ascendency, I acted conservatively by presenting my discovery primarily in phenomenological terms. Thus, my first book, Growth and Development, carried the subtitle Ecosystems Phenomenology (Ulanowicz 1986). ln that volume, I also elaborated a number of ancillary mathematical methods useful in analyzing ecosystem networks.

In his 2023 book, The First Incarnation:Hope in Reality, Ulanowicz returns to the relationship between science and religion.

It is my hope that by introducing significant new discoveries from ecosystems theory I can provide a new layer of material for expanded conversations on issues between science and religion. But first l will devote myself to deconstruction of the widespread belief that all of reality issues from and comes down to the fundamental laws of physics, otherwise known as obligate physical reductionism. I do not believe that the physical laws are violated, only that their ability to determine higher level phenomena is limited. They continue to constrain, but they lose their powers to determine specific outcomes in complex systems.

Demonstrating the semi-autonomy of larger systems from microscopic antecedents opens up rational consideration of numerous transcendental questions, that occupy those studying the relationship between science and religion, such as the existence of free will, the possibility of Divine intervention and miracles, the efficacy of intercessory prayer, the existence of direction in evolution, the broader conception of aleatoric events beyond blind chance, and an eschatological end of the universe, other than a meaningless "heat death."

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