Here's a picture from my recent trip back home. Buses are a lot more common here than in the US and the quality is quite a bit higher. For this trip I was on the front seat of the top deck of an Intercape bus. It's a decent company save their unfortunate practice of incessant Christian propaganda during the ride.
This post is dedicated to Mark Bedau , my philosophy professor at Reed, a great guy and a wonderful teacher, by far the least pretentious philosopher I've ever met. He is responsible for this post only insofar as he sparked my interest in the subject; its many shortcomings are mine alone. Who's ready for some unqualified philosophical rambling? I'm not going to do much more than summarize, as this is probably one of the five biggest problems in philosophy and the material quickly gets out of hand. Anyway—let's start with some terms, appropriately hefty philosophical ones. (I'm going to steal shamelessly from Wikipedia, as the free will article is very good.) Free will is "purported ability of agents to make choices free from constraints." Some call it the "ability to have done otherwise," but that definition runs into problems which I'll describe later. Determinism is the view that all events are caused by previous events, while indet...

Welcome back, Ryan. B
ReplyDeleteHey Ryan, When I first rode Intercape and the Christian propaganda caught my attention--I was shocked! I remember thinking to myself, "Is this legal?" I hadn't realized how much I appreciated (and took for granted) the respect and freedom of religion offered in our country. Other than that, I love riding Intercape! Quite a contrast to the taxis and worth every penny of the extra cost!
ReplyDeleteYeah, I agree. If I weren't so income-constrained I'd definitely always take the bus, and bugger the religious nonsense—that's why God made headphones!
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