I'm normally an extremely even-keeled sort (as in, I've been called a robot by more than one ex-girlfriend). But wrapping up my service here is inducing all kinds of emotional turmoil. The volunteers in my group are dropping like flies—my neighbor is gone, so I'm again alone in the valley. Cooper over in Cambodia, one of my fellow Peace Corps blog-obsessives, has closed up shop. I keep thinking about all the things I will likely never do again. It's strange and disorienting, and I just want it to be over already. Eish!
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...
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