Derk Pereboom was born on 1957 and is the Susan Linn Sage Professor in Philosophy and Ethics at Cornell University.
12 Facts About Derk Pereboom
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Derk Pereboom specializes in free will and moral responsibility, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and the work of Immanuel Kant.
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Derk Pereboom was born in the village of Pesse, near Hoogeveen, the Netherlands, on February 6,1957.
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Derk Pereboom received his BA in philosophy at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1978, where his teachers included Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff.
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Derk Pereboom earned his PhD 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.
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Derk Pereboom 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.
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Derk Pereboom 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.
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Derk 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.
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Derk Pereboom 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.
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The physicalist position Derk Pereboom proposes in philosophy of mind develops two responses to the hard problem of consciousness, which is explicated by Frank Cameron Jackson's knowledge argument and David Chalmers' conceivability argument against physicalism.
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Derk Pereboom defends a version of 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.
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Derk Pereboom contends that this view secures genuine mental causation, by contrast with the more commonly endorsed functionalist alternative.