"I'm confused about this mainly because I can't understand the startling divide between the language one hears from the European financial industry, and the language one hears in European politics. There is virtually no one in the Dutch political scene calling for anything like what the Dutch financial industry wants. I find this bizarre. But perhaps I'm just used to the American political scene, where whatever Wall Street wants gets put in a package, express-mailed to Washington, and is on the floor of Congress the next day." --a blogger at Democracy in America.
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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