Howdy folks, apologies for the long silence here. I've been meaning to update but haven't gotten around to it. Anyways, I do at least have a decent excuse: I'm working on a massive project about the economic benefits of protected lands. I'm on a paid reporting jaunt from Washington, through Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and Colorado where I'll be looking at various national parks, monuments, and forests. Further updates will follow, but for now I've got to get to sleep.
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...
Sweet, Ryan. Sounds like a grand adventure and just up your alley, too. Will be looking forward to your reports and your safe return.
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