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Guy Fulton
Florence Oregon
Interests: art, writing, philosophy of free will and the mind/body problem, coastal hiking.
Recent Activity
Guy Fulton is now following tnadelhoffer
Apr 11, 2014
The Calvin and Hobbes way of naming free will positions:
Calvinballers for libertarians - Because they play a game where the rules come out of nowhere;
Susies for compatibilists - Because they like to play games where the rules make sense, games which are constantly messed up by calvinballers;
And Hobbeses for semi-compatibilists - Who are content to play both games.
The collective noun for libertarians
'Lam' according to the inimitable Alan White ('inimitable' is an overused word: it's use should be restricted to describing Alan until further notice to allow it to regain its power). The remark appears in Alan's review of Tim Mawson's new book, Free Will: A Guide for the Perplexed (my own revie...
I have never really been able to understand Doyle's explanation of how his free will gets around Strawson's Basic Argument and I would be interested to see it more fully fleshed out.
My understanding is that it works something like: Indeterminism gives us multiple potential choices and a higher level determinism based in Newtonian physics allows us to sift through those choices and freely choose. I always feel like Strawson would say that giving a determined being different choices would make those still choices determined and therefore such a being would not be ultimately responsible for anything. Probably it is far more complicated than this and I hope the book will clear up everything to my satisfaction.
Also is the book going to be available on informationphilosopher.com after it comes out for kindle?
Doyle, Free Will and the Scandal in Philosophy
Bob Doyle is offering to send review copies of his forthcoming college-level sourcebook and textbook on the problem of free will and determinism to Flickers of Freedom contributors and commentators. Doyle was an occasional contributor to the Garden of Forking Paths blog. The 480-page book contai...
Guy Fulton is now following Bob Doyle
Jan 20, 2010
The respondants who belived the least in libertarianism were the Aesthetics with 1 / 38 (2.6%) in favor of the idea. Interestingly the Aesthetics had a slightly lower amount of atheists (68.4%) than average.
Cognitive Scientists also responded with a low opinion of libertarianism (3.5%), with very high (90%) atheism.
Follow up on the Survey
For those who haven't seen it, there is a discussion over at Leiter on the survey, with special reference to the (alleged) connection between libertarianism and theism. This is a topic worth its own thread, I think. My observation, for what it's worth, slightly orthogonal to the theism causes/c...
Here is a list including some of the oldies and Chisholm. Also it is my first post on GOFP.
1. Immanuel Kant, "Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals"
- Its the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals!
2. Roderick Chisholm, "Freedom and Action"
- How can nobody have mentioned Roderick yet?
3. Thomas Hobbes, "Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance"
- The origin of the Libertarian Dilemma.
4. Roger Penrose, "The Emperor's New Mind"
- For a look at what scientists and mathematicians are doing with Determinism/Indeterminism. Particularly the sections on the Turing Machine and the Chinese Room.
5. Jorge Borges, "The Garden of Forking Paths"
-No, I guess it isn't technically philosophy, but I imagine future solutions to things, and past ideas will come through his style of writing and thinking. For inst. Laplace's Demon, or John Locke's Locked Room argument both seem like they came straight from the works of Borges.
Note: I really cant remember where the Libertarian Dilemma comes in the works of Hobbes. I just guessed.
Meme Permutation
OK, so maybe I've been spending too much time on facebook these days and I'm infected by the plethora of top 5 memes there. But bear with me.* Suppose someone wanted to know the key** readings/works in the free will literature. How would you answer? But wait, there are three further rules: (...
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