John Randolph (JR) Lucas, pictured here, received his philosophical education at Oxford University in the 1950s. He was a student of R.M Hare, a central figure in mid 20th century debates over meta-ethics. Lucas never took to meta-ethics himself, though. His interests were in applied (business) ethics, the philosophy of mathematics, and the philosophy of mind. Probably the one contribution of Lucas' that will still draw the attention of the historians of philosophy in another century is his invocation of Godel's incompleteness theorem in the course of arguments about the human mind and artificial intelligence, which in turn inspired Douglas Hofstadter. Much of Godel, Escher, Bach was a reply to Lucas. Here's a Lucas paper on point: http://www.leaderu.com/truth/2truth08.html If I understand the argument, Lucas believed that humans will in principle always be able to outsmart computers (or "Turing machines") because such machines have limits that follo...
