I'm scrambling around trying to close on some part-time jobs, find a place to live (looks like I'll be staying in or around the Silver Spring area), and prepare for my internship. For now, I'm just incredibly grateful to some old Colorado friends who have graciously allowed me to crash in their spare bedroom until I get on my feet. Afloat in a sea of the milk of human kindness, as my dad once wrote.
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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