John Lucas | |
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Born | 18 June 1929 |
Alma mater | Balliol College, Oxford |
Notable work | "Minds, Machines and Gödel" |
Era | 21st-century philosophy |
Region | Western Philosophy |
School | Analytic philosophy |
Institutions | Merton College, Oxford |
Main interests
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Logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of mind |
Notable ideas
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Gödelian argument Penrose–Lucas argument |
Influences
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Influenced
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John Randolph Lucas FBA (born 18 June 1929) is a British philosopher.
John Lucas was educated at Winchester College and Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied first mathematics, then Greats (Philosophy and Ancient History), obtaining first class honours, and taking the Oxford 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 remains an emeritus member of the University Faculty of Philosophy. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Lucas is perhaps best known for his paper "Minds, Machines and Gödel," arguing that an automaton cannot represent a human mathematician, essentially refuting computationalism.
An author with diverse teaching and research interests, Lucas has written 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 two books on physics coauthored with Peter E. Hodgson, causality, political philosophy, ethics and business ethics, and the philosophy of religion.