John Lucas was educated at Winchester College and Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied first mathematics, then Greats (Philosophy and Ancient History), obtaining first class honors, and proceeding to an MA in Philosophy in 1954. He spent the 1957-58 academic year at Princeton University, deepening his understanding of mathematics and logic. For 36 years, until his 1996 retirement, he was a Fellow and Tutor of Merton College, Oxford, and he remains an emeritus member of the University Faculty of Philosophy. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Lucas is perhaps best known for his paper "Minds, Machines and Gödel," arguing that an automaton cannot represent a human mathematician, essentially refuting computationalism.
A prolific author with unusually diverse teaching and research interests, Lucas has written on the philosophy of mathematics, especially the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, the philosophy of mind, free will and determinism, the philosophy of science including two books on physics coauthored with Peter E. Hodgson, causality, political philosophy, ethics and business ethics, and the philosophy of religion.
The son of a Church of England clergyman, and an Anglican himself, Lucas describes himself as "a dyed-in-the-wool traditional Englishman." He and Morar Portal have four children, among them Edward Lucas, Central and Eastern European correspondent of The Economist. Sartorially independent, he had the cool-weather habit of wearing a tie over his sweater and under a jacket.
In addition to his philosophical career, Lucas has a practical interest in business ethics. He helped found the Oxford Consumers' Group, and was its first Chairman in 1961-3, serving again in 1965.
Lucas wrote several books on the philosophy of science and space-time (see below). In A treatise on time and space he introduced a transcendental derivation of the Lorenz Transformations based on Red and Blue exchanging messages (in Russian and Greek respectively) from their respective frames of reference which demonstrates how these can be derived from a minimal set of philosophical assumptions.
In The Future Lucas gives a detailed analysis of tenses and time, arguing that "the Block universe gives a deeply inadequate view of time. It fails to account for the passage of time, the pre-eminence of the present, the directedness of time and the difference between the future and the past" and in favour of a tree structure in which there is only one past or present (at any given point in spacetime) but a large number of possible futures. "We are by our own decisions in the face of other men's actions and chance circumstances weaving the web of history on the loom of natural necessity"
