Christian List
Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU Munich
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Christian List is professor of philosophy and decision theory at LMU Munich and co-director of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. He was previously professor of political science and philosophy at the London School of Economics, and he was elected to the British Academy in 2014. His doctoral work was at Nuffield College, Oxford, and his research spans social choice theory, formal epistemology, political philosophy and the philosophy of social science.
In Why Free Will Is Real (Harvard University Press, 2019) he defended the compatibilist position that free will is compatible with determinism, that agency-level explanation is where the concept lives, and that the demand for indeterminism or for an extra metaphysical ingredient mislocates the question. The argument treats intentionality as an explanatory practice that earns or fails to earn its keep at the level of persons and systems, never at the level of physics below them.
His 2025 Synthese paper carries the framework to artificial systems. The paper argues that the question “can AI systems have free will” should be answered by asking whether we have good explanatory reasons to view the system as an intentional agent with the capacity for choice between alternative possibilities and control over resulting actions, and that neither a mysterious property nor indeterministic algorithms nor unpredictability is required. For the consciousness debate the framework is a separation tool. Free will attribution, on his account, can come apart from experience, which blocks the common slide from agency evidence to consciousness verdicts that the indicator literature works hard to keep distinct.
Known for. Why Free Will Is Real (Harvard University Press, 2019), compatibilism, social choice theory, the intentional-agent test for AI free will
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Christian List is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.