Robert Kane (philosopher)

He is the author of Free Will and Values (1985), Through the Moral Maze (1994), and The Significance of Free Will (1996: awarded the 1996 Robert W. Hamilton Faculty Book Award). He also edited the Oxford Handbook of Free Will (2004) and has published many articles in the philosophy of mind and action, ethics, the theory of values and philosophy of religion.

In his 1985 book Free Will and Values, aware of earlier proposals by neurobiologist John Eccles, Popper, and Dennett, but working independently, Kane proposed an ambitious amplifier model for a quantum randomizer in the brain - a spinning wheel of fortune with probability bubbles corresponding to alternative possibilities, in the massive switch amplifier (MSA) tradition of Compton.

Kane studied philosophy from 1956 to 1960 at Holy Cross College (B.A. 1960), from 1958 to 1959 at the University of Vienna, and from 1960 to 1964 at Yale University (M.A. 1962, Ph.D. 1964).

Robert Hilary Kane (born 1938, Boston) is an American philosopher. He is Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently on phased retirement.

Kane is one of several philosophers and scientists to propose a two-stage model of free will. The American philosopher William James was the first (in 1884). Others include the French mathematician and scientist Henri Poincaré (about 1906), the physicist Arthur Holly Compton (1931, 1955), the philosopher Karl Popper (1965, 1977), the physicist and philosopher Henry Margenau (1968, 1982), the philosopher Daniel Dennett (1978), the classicists A. A. Long and David Sedley (1987), the philosopher Alfred Mele (1995), and most recently, the neurogeneticist and biologist Martin Heisenberg (2009), son of the physicist Werner Heisenberg, whose quantum indeterminacy principle lies at the foundation of indeterministic physics.