Derk Pereboom (born 1957) is the Susan Linn Sage Professor in Philosophy and Ethics at
Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...
. He specializes in
free will
Free will is the capacity of agents to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.
Free will is closely linked to the concepts of moral responsibility, praise, culpability, sin, and other judgements which apply only to actio ...
and
moral responsibility
In philosophy, moral responsibility is the status of morally deserving praise, blame, reward, or punishment for an act or omission in accordance with one's moral obligations.
Deciding what (if anything) counts as "morally obligatory" is a princi ...
,
philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are addre ...
,
philosophy of religion
Philosophy of religion is "the philosophical examination of the central themes and concepts involved in religious traditions". Philosophical discussions on such topics date from ancient times, and appear in the earliest known texts concerning ph ...
, and the work of
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and ...
.
Life and career
Derk Pereboom was born in the village of
Pesse
Pesse is a village in the Dutch province of Drenthe. It is located in the municipality of Hoogeveen.''ANWB Topografische Atlas Nederland'', Topografische Dienst and ANWB, 2005.
Overview
Pesse is an ''esdorp'' which developed in the Middle Ages ...
, near
Hoogeveen
Hoogeveen (; nds-nl, 't Ogeveine or '' 't Oveine'') is a municipality and a town in the Dutch province of Drenthe.
Population centres
Elim, Fluitenberg, Hoogeveen and Noordscheschut, which still have the canals which used to be throughout ...
, the Netherlands, on February 6, 1957. He received his BA in philosophy at
Calvin College
Calvin University, formerly Calvin College, is a private Christian university in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Founded in 1876, Calvin University is an educational institution of the Christian Reformed Church and stands in the Reformed (Calvinist) ...
in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1978, where his teachers included
Alvin Plantinga
Alvin Carl Plantinga (born November 15, 1932) is an American analytic philosopher who works primarily in the fields of philosophy of religion, epistemology (particularly on issues involving epistemic justification), and logic.
From 1963 to 1982, ...
and
Nicholas Wolterstorff
Nicholas Paul Wolterstorff (born January 21, 1932) is an American philosopher and theologian. He is currently Noah Porter Professor Emeritus Philosophical Theology at Yale University. A prolific writer with wide-ranging philosophical and theologi ...
. He earned his PhD at
University of California, Los Angeles
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...
in 1985, with a dissertation on
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and ...
's theory of mental representation under the supervision of
Robert Merrihew Adams
Robert Merrihew Adams (born September 8, 1937) is an American analytic philosopher, specializing in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, ethics, and the history of early modern philosophy.
Life and career
Adams was born on September 8, 1937, ...
and
Tyler Burge
Tyler Burge (; born 1946) is an American philosopher who is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. Burge has made contributions to many areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, philosophy of logic, epistemology, philosop ...
.
He was an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the
University of Vermont
The University of Vermont (UVM), officially the University of Vermont and State Agricultural College, is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Burlington, Vermont. It was founded in 1791 and is amon ...
from 1985 to 1991, associate professor from 1991 to 1997, and professor from 1997 to 2007. he has been professor in the Sage School of Philosophy at
Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...
.
he is the subject co-editor on topics in the
philosophy of action
Action theory (or theory of action) is an area in philosophy concerned with theories about the processes causing willful human bodily movements of a more or less complex kind. This area of thought involves epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, j ...
for the ''
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (''SEP'') combines an online encyclopedia of philosophy with peer-reviewed publication of original papers in philosophy, freely accessible to Internet users. It is maintained by Stanford University. Eac ...
'',
and he has also written for the encyclopedia.
Philosophical work
Free will
Pereboom's position in the
free will
Free will is the capacity of agents to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.
Free will is closely linked to the concepts of moral responsibility, praise, culpability, sin, and other judgements which apply only to actio ...
debate is known as
hard incompatibilism
Incompatibilism is the view that a deterministic universe is completely at odds with the notion that persons have free will, the latter being defined as the capacity of conscious agents to choose a future course of action among several availabl ...
. He maintains that due to general facts about the nature of the universe, we lack the free will required for the aspect of
moral responsibility
In philosophy, moral responsibility is the status of morally deserving praise, blame, reward, or punishment for an act or omission in accordance with one's moral obligations.
Deciding what (if anything) counts as "morally obligatory" is a princi ...
at issue in the traditional debate. That is, whether our actions are deterministically or indeterministically caused, we will not have the control in action required for our deserving to be blamed or punished for immoral decisions, and to be praised or rewarded for those that are morally exemplary. Pereboom nevertheless proposes that forward-looking aspects of blaming and praising, those that aim, for instance, at improving character and reconciliation in relationships, are compatible with our lacking free will. He also contends that denying free will is likely to diminish anger and the desire to punish, and in this way can benefit human relationships, both personal and societal. In this respect his position is inspired by the view of
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch (de) Spinoza (born Bento de Espinosa; later as an author and a correspondent ''Benedictus de Spinoza'', anglicized to ''Benedict de Spinoza''; 24 November 1632 – 21 February 1677) was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish origin, b ...
, who argues in his ''Ethics'' that denying free will would enhance the quality of human life.
Philosophy of mind
The physicalist position Pereboom proposes in
philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are addre ...
develops two responses to the
hard problem of consciousness
The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why and how humans have qualia or phenomenal experiences. This is in contrast to the "easy problems" of explaining the physical systems that give us and other animals the ability to d ...
, which is explicated by
Frank Cameron Jackson
Frank Cameron Jackson (born 31 August 1943) is an Australian analytic philosopher and Emeritus Professor in the School of Philosophy (Research School of Social Sciences) at Australian National University (ANU) where he had spent most of the l ...
's knowledge argument and
David Chalmers
David John Chalmers (; born 20 April 1966) is an Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist specializing in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. He is a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York Universi ...
' conceivability argument against physicalism. The first response invokes the possibility that introspective representations fail to represent mental properties as they are in themselves; specifically, that introspection represents phenomenally conscious properties as having certain characteristic qualitative natures which these properties actually lack. This position is related to the more genera
illusionism about consciousnessadvanced by
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett III (born March 28, 1942) is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relat ...
and to an illusionist view set out by neuroscientist
Michael Graziano
Michael Steven Anthony Graziano (born May 22, 1967) is an American scientist and novelist who is currently a professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Princeton University.Russellian monist
Neutral monism is an umbrella term for a class of metaphysical theories in the philosophy of mind. These theories reject the dichotomy of mind and matter, believing the fundamental nature of reality to be neither mental nor physical; in other words ...
proposal that currently unknown fundamental
intrinsic properties
In science and engineering, an intrinsic property is a property of a specified subject that exists itself or within the subject. An extrinsic property is not essential or inherent to the subject that is being characterized. For example, mass ...
provide categorical bases for known physical properties and also yield an account of consciousness. There are non-physicalist versions of this position, but some are amenable to physicalism, and Pereboom highlights such views in his treatment.
Pereboom defends a version o
nonreductive physicalism a view proposed by
Hilary Putnam
Hilary Whitehall Putnam (; July 31, 1926 – March 13, 2016) was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, and a major figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He made significant contributions ...
in the 1960s, according to which types of mental states are not identical to types of states at lower levels, such as the neural and the microphysical. The nonreductive position he defends departs from others in that it also rejects all token-identity (i.e., specific-instance-identity) claims for the relation between mental states and states at lower levels. The relation between the mental and the microphysical i
material constitution with the provision that this relation is not to be explicated by the notion of identity. But mental properties are nevertheless identical to higher-level compositional properties, properties that things have by virtue of the natures of their parts and relations among them. Pereboom contends that this view secures genuine mental causation, by contrast with the more commonly endorsed
functionalist alternative. In this respect his position is perhaps a compromise with
type-identity theory.
[Derk Pereboom, ''Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism'', New York, Oxford University Press, 2011, Chapters 7-8.] Still, his view is not a reductive identity theory, since he holds that mental compositional properties are
multiply realizable at any level more fundamental than the mental (e.g., the neural).
Selected publications
Authored books
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Edited books
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Articles
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References
External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Pereboom, Derk
Living people
Cornell University faculty
University of California, Los Angeles alumni
Calvin University alumni
1957 births
University of Vermont faculty
Philosophers of mind
Metaphysicians