Derk Pereboom (philosopher)
| Derk Pereboom | |
|---|---|
| Born | February 6, 1957 The Netherlands |
| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
|
Main interests
|
Philosophy of action, free will, philosophy of mind |
|
Notable ideas
|
free will skepticism, nonreductive physicalism |
Derk Pereboom is the Susan Linn Sage Professor in Philosophy and Ethics at Cornell University, located in Ithaca, New York, USA. He specializes in the areas of free will and moral responsibility, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and in the work of Immanuel Kant. He is co-editor for topics in the philosophy of action for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and he has also written for the encyclopedia.
Derk Pereboom was born in the village of Pesse, near Hoogeveen, the Netherlands, in 1957. He received his B.A in Philosophy at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1978, where his teachers included Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff. He earned his Ph.D. at University of California, Los Angeles in 1985, with a dissertation on Immanuel Kant's theory of mental representation under the supervision of Robert Merrihew Adams and Tyler Burge. He was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vermont from 1985 to 1991, Associate Professor from 1991 to 1997, and Professor from 1997 to 2007. Since 2007 he has been Professor in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University.
Free Will
Pereboom’s position in the free will debate is a type of free will skepticism 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 moral responsibility at issue in the traditional debate. That is, we lack 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. Like the hard determinist philosopher Baruch Spinoza, Pereboom holds that if determinism is true, free will of this kind is ruled out. But he also argues that if our decisions are indeterministic events, this sort of free will is precluded. The possibility for such free will that remains is libertarian agent causation, according to which agents as substances (thus not merely as having a role in events) can cause actions without being causally determined to do so. But Pereboom contends that for empirical reasons it is unlikely that we are agent causes of this sort.
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