John Martin Fischer (born December 26, 1952) is an American philosopher. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside and a leading contributor to the philosophy of free will and moral responsibility.^[1]

Education and career

Fischer received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University and his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1982. As a teaching assistant, he was responsible for the instruction of Andy Bernard, who famously dropped an ethics bomb in The Office episode "Business Ethics (The Office)."^[1] He began his teaching career at Yale University, where he taught for almost a decade before joining the faculty at the University of California, Riverside.

In June 2011, Fischer was elected Vice-President of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association and became President of the Pacific Division in 2013.^[1] In 2024, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[2]

Philosophical work

While Fischer's work centers primarily on free will and moral responsibility, where he is particularly noted as a proponent of semi-compatibilism^[3] (the idea that regardless of whether free will and determinism are compatible, moral responsibility and determinism are),^[4] he also has worked on the metaphysics of death and philosophy of religion and led a multi-year, multi-pronged research project on "immortality," funded in 2012 by the John Templeton Foundation.^[5]

Books

• Moral Responsibility (editor) (Cornell University Press, 1986)
• God, Foreknowledge and Freedom (editor) (Stanford University Press, 1989)
• Perspectives on Moral Responsibility (co-editor with Ravizza) (Cornell University Press, 1993)
• The Metaphysics of Death (editor) (Stanford University Press, 1993)
• The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control (Blackwell, 1994)
• Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (co-authored with Ravizza) (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
• My Way: Essays on Moral Responsibility (Oxford University Press, 2006)
• Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will (Oxford University Press, 2009)
• Near-Death Experiences: Understanding Visions of the Afterlife (co-authored with Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin) (Oxford University Press, 2016)
• Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life. Oxford University Press. 2019. ISBN 9780190921149.

Media appearances and interviews

• Shermer, Michael (17 December 2019). "John Martin Fischer — Death, Immortality and Meaning in Life". Science Salon (Podcast). Skeptic Magazine.
• Friction (Philosophy) (15 July 2021). "John Martin Fischer - Free will, God, Meaning, and More" (Interview). Archived from the original on 2021-12-21.