Prof. Dr. Christian List

Christian List joined LMU in January 2021, taking up the newly created Chair in Philosophy and Decision Theory. He was previously Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at the London School of Economics, where he remains a Visiting Professor. He works at the intersection of philosophy, economics, and political science, with a particular focus on individual and collective decision-making and the nature of intentional agency. A growing part of his work also addresses metaphysical questions, e.g., about free will, causation, probability, and the relationship between “micro” and “macro” levels of analysis in the human and social sciences.

A graduate of the University of Oxford, he held visiting or research positions at Oxford, the Australian National University, Princeton University, Harvard University, MIT, the University of Konstanz, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, and Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. He received a number of awards for his work, including a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Philosophy (2007), the Social Choice and Welfare Prize (2010, jointly with Franz Dietrich), a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2013-2016), and the Joseph B. Gittler Award of the American Philosophical Association (2020). He is a Fellow of the British Academy (elected in 2014). More information and downloadable papers can be found on his webpage at: http://christianlist.net.

Recent publications

• Why Free Will is Real, Harvard University Press, 2019 (for interviews on the book, see, e.g., Nautilus, Scientific American Blog, and Philosophy Bites).

• Free will: real or illusion? (A debate with G. D. Caruso and C. J. Clark) The Philosopher 108(1), 2020.

• The relation between degrees of belief and binary beliefs: A general impossibility theorem (with F. Dietrich), in Lotteries, Knowledge, and Rational Belief, edited by Igor Douven, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.

• Dynamic and stochastic systems as a framework for metaphysics and the philosophy of science (with M. Pivato), Synthese, online early.

• What normative facts should political theory be about? Philosophy of science meets political liberalism (with L. Valentini), Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy 6: 185-220, 2020.

• Levels: descriptive, explanatory, and ontological, Nous 53(4): 852-883, 2019.

• What's wrong with the consequence argument: In defence of compatibilist libertarianism, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 119(3): 253-274, 2019.

• Democratic Deliberation and Social Choice: A Review, Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, 2018.

• From Degrees of Belief to Binary Beliefs: Lessons from Judgment-Aggregation Theory (with F. Dietrich), Journal of Philosophy 115(5): 225-270, 2018.

• What is it like to be a group agent? Nous 52(2): 295-319, 2018.

• What matters and how it matters: A choice-theoretic representation of moral theories (with F. Dietrich), The Philosophical Review 126(4): 421-479, 2017.

• Probabilistic Opinion Pooling Generalized (with F. Dietrich), a pair of companion papers:
  • Part One: General Agendas, Social Choice and Welfare 48(4): 747-786, 2017.
  • Part Two: The Premise-based Approach, Social Choice and Welfare 48(4): 787-814, 2017.
• Does the exclusion argument put any pressure on dualism? (with D. Stoljar), Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95(1): 96-108, 2017.
• Reason-based choice and context-dependence: An explanatory framework (with F. Dietrich), Economics and Philosophy 32(2): 175-229, 2016.
• Mentalism versus behaviourism in economics: a philosophy-of-science perspective (with F. Dietrich), Economics and Philosophy 32(2): 249-281, 2016.
• Freedom as independence (with L. Valentini), Ethics 126(4): 1043-1074, 2016.
• Belief revision generalized: A joint characterization of Bayes's and Jeffrey's rules (with F. Dietrich and R. Bradley), Journal of Economic Theory 162: 352-371, 2016.
• Emergent Chance (with M. Pivato), The Philosophical Review 124(1): 119-152, 2015.

Here you find a full list of downloadable papers.