Speaker

Christian List

Christian List

Philosopher at the Munich Centre for Mathematical Philosophy (LMU Munich), known for a rigorous non-reductive physicalist defence of compatibilist free will and for foundational work in social choice theory and group agency.

List trained at Oxford and the London School of Economics (where he was later Professor of Philosophy and Political Science) before moving to Munich. His work spans individual and collective decision-making, the metaphysics of levels, formal epistemology, and quantum mechanics. He operates at the intersection of philosophy, economics, mathematics, and cognitive science — the interdisciplinary character of the MCMP being central to how he works.

His best-known contributions fall in two clusters. The first is the metaphysics of free will: arguing that determinism and indeterminism are level-relative properties, that macro-level indeterminism (emergent indeterminism) is ontically real rather than merely epistemic, and that free will requires three conditions — intentional agency, genuine agential alternatives, and causal control by mental states — none of which presupposes consciousness. The second is group agency, developed with Philip Pettit in their book Group Agency (2011): the case that organised collectives (firms, courts, states) can be genuine intentional agents with functional analogs of belief, desire, and decision, and that these agents are candidates for moral and legal responsibility.

Core positions

List is a non-reductive physicalist: he accepts supervenience (all high-level facts necessitated by microphysical facts) but denies that supervenience implies explanatory reducibility. His combinatorial argument turns on the gap between countable description languages and the uncountably many possible macro-level properties — a principled reason to expect that most explanatorily relevant high-level properties cannot be expressed in any lower-level vocabulary.

On free will, his three-condition framework (intentional agency, alternative agential possibilities, causal control) is expressly portable: it applies to animals, corporations, and AI systems in exactly the same way it applies to humans. Free will is a functional notion severed from any consciousness requirement, which is why its satisfaction by AI would matter practically — it would make those systems candidates for moral responsibility.

On consciousness, his view diverges sharply. Unlike agency, consciousness is first-personal: it concerns phenomenal experience, not third-personal behaviour or causal structure. List finds himself outside standard physicalism on this question — drawn toward the view that first-personal facts are genuinely irreducible, and that the problem of accommodating them within an impersonal scientific picture is structurally harder than anything in the free will debate.

In the wiki