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 tea ...

. 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 ac ...

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 ...

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 add ...

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, near Hoogeveen, the Netherlands, on February 6, 1957. He received his BA in philosophy at Calvin College 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 198 ...

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 theolog ...

. 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 S ...

in 1985, with a dissertation on

's theory of mental representation under the supervision of Robert Merrihew Adams 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, philoso ...

. 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 land-grant research university in Burlington, Vermont. It was founded in 1791 and is among the oldest universities in the United ...

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

. 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'', and he has also written for the encyclopedia.

Philosophical work

Free will

Pereboom's position in the

debate is known as hard incompatibilism. He maintains that due to general facts about the nature of the universe, we lack the free will required for the aspect of

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, 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

develops two responses to the hard problem of consciousness, 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 Univers ...

' 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 consciousness
advanced by Daniel Dennett 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 proposal that currently unknown fundamental intrinsic properties 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 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

* {{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