James F. Thomson (philosopher)

James F. Thomson (1921–1984) was a British philosopher who devised the puzzle of Thomson's lamp (a variation on Zeno's paradox), to argue against the possibility of supertasks (a word he also coined).

Thomson was born in London in 1921 and graduated from the University of London in 1949. He was an assistant in the Department of Philosophy, and John Stuart Mill Scholar at University College, London, from 1949–1950. He was Commonwealth Fund Fellow at Harvard and Princeton from 1950–1951; assistant lecturer at University College from 1951–1953 and University Lecturer in Moral Science at the University of Cambridge from 1953–1956. Thomson was appointed Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1956, and also University Lecturer at Columbia University. He was visiting professor at Columbia from 1961–1962, and in 1963 he was appointed professor of philosophy at MIT.

In 1962 he married the American philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson. They separated in 1976 and divorced in 1980; they remained colleagues until James Thomson’s death in 1984.

In a seminal 1954 article which followed on from the work of Max Black, Thomson considered the successful completion of an infinite number of tasks within a given time, to which he gave the name supertasks.

To disprove the possibility of supertasks, he introduced Thomson's lamp, a thought experiment similar to Zeno's paradoxes. This problem involves the mathematical summation of an infinite divergent series such as Grandi's.

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