Christian List - Biography#

Christian List is Professor of Philosophy and Decision Theory at LMU Munich, and Co-Director of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. He is also Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, where he taught previously, first as Lecturer and Reader in Political Science (2002-7), then as Professor of Philosophy and Political Science (2007-2020). He works at the intersection of philosophy and social science, with a focus on individual and collective decision-making and the nature of intentional agency. He often uses formal methods and collaborates with colleagues from other fields, such as economics, mathematics, law, and biology. A growing part of his work also addresses metaphysical questions, e.g., about free will, mental causation, probability, and the relationship between “micro” and “macro” levels of analysis in the human and social sciences. He was educated at the University of Oxford, gaining a BA in Mathematics in Philosophy (1996) and an MPhil (1996) and a DPhil in Politics (2001). He held research or visiting positions at Oxford (Nuffield College), the Australian National University, Princeton University, Harvard University, MIT, the University of Konstanz, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala University, and Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. He was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Philosophy and Ethics in 2007, the 2010 Social Choice and Welfare Prize (jointly with F. Dietrich) for his work on judgment aggregation, a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for a project on “Reasons, decisions, and intentional agency”, and the 2020 Joseph B. Gittler Award of the American Philosophical Association for his book Why Free Will is Real. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2014 and a Member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in 2022. He has served as editor of Economics and Philosophy (2007-12), subject editor for philosophy of social science at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (since 2015), and editorial board member at Episteme, Mind, and the Journal of Logic and Computation.