John Lucas (philosopher)
John Randolph Lucas FBA (18 June 1929 – 5 April 2020)[1] was a British philosopher.
Biography[edit]
Lucas was educated at Winchester College and then, as a pupil of R.M. Hare, among others, at Balliol College, Oxford.[2] He studied first mathematics, then Greats (Greek, Latin, Philosophy and Ancient History), obtaining first class honours in both. He sat for Finals in 1951, and took his MA in 1954. He spent the 1957–58 academic year at Princeton University, studying mathematics and logic. For 36 years, until his 1996 retirement, he was a Fellow and Tutor of Merton College, Oxford, and he remained an emeritus member of the University Faculty of Philosophy. He was a Fellow of the British Academy.[3]
Lucas is perhaps best known for his paper "Minds, Machines and Gödel," arguing that an automaton cannot represent a human mathematician, attempting to refute computationalism.
An author with diverse teaching and research interests, Lucas wrote on the philosophy of mathematics, especially the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, the philosophy of mind, free will and determinism, the philosophy of science including one book on physics co-authored with Peter E. Hodgson, causality, political philosophy, ethics and business ethics, and the philosophy of religion.
The son of a Church of England clergyman, and an Anglican himself, Lucas described himself as "a dyed-in-the-wool traditional Englishman." He had four children (Edward, Helen, Richard and Deborah) with Morar Portal, among them Edward Lucas, a former journalist at The Economist.
In addition to his philosophical career, Lucas had a practical interest in business ethics. He helped found the Oxford Consumers' Group,[4] and was its first chairman in 1961–3, serving again in 1965.
Philosophical contributions[edit]
Free will[edit]
Lucas (1961) began a lengthy and heated debate over the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorems for the anthropic mechanism thesis, by arguing that:[5]