On the train to Georgia for a wedding. It's my first trip on US rail and I'm reminded of hitchhiking across South Africa for some reason.
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...
Expect to be late, Ryan. When I took the Amtrak to South Carolina, we were more than 9 hours late. It seems the train has to pull over from time to time to let the freight trains go by. Of course that was about 5 years ago. Maybe it's better now. Although it seems that once you get out of the Northeast corridor, time begins to resemble African time. Enjoy your vacation, B
ReplyDeleteActually, it went off without a hitch. We got in more than an hour early, in point of fact, though the train station in Atlanta is in a preposterous location.
ReplyDeleteGreat news. Maybe I'll try it again some day. B
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