Causal explanations for sure address our explanatory needs, but to single then out for that reason doesn't turn them into merely epistemological issue...
Sure, I am saying that but this is something traditional incompatibilists proponents of agent-causation have been saying for a long time. But what the...
I think anti-reductionism may be more of a default position for me rather than a lemma. It is actually a position that is shared by many of the philos...
Yes, this paper by Fodor has had a significant impact on my thinking also, as well as Putnam's 'square peg through the round hole' argument (in his Ph...
Our intentions, and the practical reasons on the basis of which we act are causally efficacious, as are, in a different sense, our episodes of practic...
Well, it's true that I haven't presented a full blown and fully argue defense of my thesis, but I have also been lambasted for my posts being too long...
From a compatibilist perspective, Anthony Kenny, Freewill and Responsibility, is a favorite of mine, and it is written in an engaging style. From an i...
One problem is that the thesis of nomological determinism seldom is precisely defined. It is often equivalent to the claim that the fundamental laws o...
When I am arguing explicitly that a thesis is false, and propose arguments that purport to show the thesis to be false, that hardly is a way of saying...
I think the philosophical accounts regarding free will and determinism propounded by Michael Ayers, Michael Smith, Kadri Vihvelin and Erasmus Mayr are...
What you call "the point" is actually a substantive philosophical thesis that is in need of a rational defense however obvious its truth may seem from...
No, it's a metaphysical issue. It's a consequence of multiple realizability and of the falsity of nomological reducibility (of psychology to physics)....
It would be contradictory if both senses of "possible" were the same. But I've already taken care of distinguishing them. The agent who deliberates am...
The best I can do is keep explaining as best as I know how what it is that you think is unclear and ignore the gratuitous insults. I can't do any bett...
No. The agent may mistakenly think that he has the power to do something and not have it. He may not be strong enough to lift the suitcase, say. He ma...
Because those are complex issues and there is no point is repeating almost verbatim the same seductive albeit simplistic (and flawed) arguments that h...
It's the opposite since there is only one possibility from the external non-interventionist Laplacean perspective (1) whereas that are typically sever...
There are different forms of explanations of events, and likewise there are different forms of causal processes that that are the topics of those diff...
The two sorts of possibilities that I was discussing were (1) an event being possible consistently with the system it is involved in being in some ini...
It's not something extant that I meant to refer to. I was suggesting that two different sorts of occurrences -- agent-causation and event-event Humean...
It it really that hard? Apologies if it is badly formulated. I am simply referring to the fact that rational agents such as us, when we deliberate abo...
This is a category error. A causal structure isn't a process of any kind. And yes, there most definitely is a need to invoke supervenience in order to...
It is actually ignored by a majority of participants in the debate. The relevance of the metaphysics of substances and powers (which contrasts with th...
It is relevant to the 'free will and determinism' debate because the way 'possible' is tacitly understood in discussions of the principle of alternati...
The analysis is meant as a conspicuous definition that captures how we talk about dispositions of ordinary things. Those dispositions may be linked ei...
You are not disagreeing with the analyses of dispositions that I have mentioned being consistent with determinism, are you? If anything, those analyse...
What are you referring to as "that particular linguistic characterization"? It would be a mistake to view those conditional analyses as mere arbitrary...
Sure, there is a sense of possibility that applies to unactualized dispositions (or unexercised powers or abilities). This is the sense that is captur...
I agree with you -- regarding traditional PAP-denying-compatibilism -- but I think traditional incompatibilist libertarianism also is on such an off-r...
The discussion of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) has been central to the debate about free will and determinism for decades and it i...
That depends on what it is that you want them to offer as "an option". Since they are compatibilists, they are not offering "an option" for agents to ...
When you are saying that the powers in question "are not available" you are merely pointing out that they are not exercised in the actual circumstance...
For sure, this is a common way to be a determinist. In his book The Refutation of Determinism, Michael Ayers (London: Methuen, 1968) calls this sort o...
According to a dispositional analysis of powers, the fact that an object doesn't exercise a power on some occasion doesn't show that the object didn't...
Yes, I also noticed that jkop began by mentioning and defining compatibilism and then seemed to be describing a form of incompatibilist libertarianism...
It's always difficult deciding what kind of an -ist one foremost is. I'm all for eudemonia and flourishing. So I may primarily be a florist. I approve...
I am unsure what issue you are trying to raise. The rotating disk is in a stationary state. It is not undergoing any sort of deformation as seen from ...
What about older insights, scientific or philosophical, that have *not* been rendered obsolete by modern knowledge? Do ideas all come labeled with a e...
Yes, linear speed just is tangential speed in this case. I was not picturing a moving clock but rather an observer skipping from one clock to the next...
Yes, that's true if you construe the rotating observer at the edge constantly shifting from one ("co-moving") inertial frame to another, and the simul...
Not quite. From the point of view of special relativity, as analysed with respect to an inertial frame, only the scalar speed along the tangent of the...
The further away from the center of the rotating disk the clocks are, the most they will lag. This is in accordance with the familiar special relativi...
Optical Character Recognition... to convert the raw images in the pdf files that I had generated into searchable text (that can also be underlined, hi...
Thanks for the recommendation. I noticed that Google Books makes the whole book available for online reading. (I grabbed it and OCRed it so that I cou...
Yes, nice that's its freely available online. It's based on two lectures that you can also watch on YouTube. Science, Yes; Scientism, No Scientistic P...
Welcome back! I remember that there was a very good thread on the older forum about Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Was that your thread? In any case, if yo...
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