[Vision2020] Philosophical question

[Donovan Arnold]

I think it would only be strange if the word "knowledge" didn't change in definition and meaning from generation to generation and from culture to culture as all words do. 
 
"Free will", or lack there of, is one of the most exciting concepts to me. Every event that occurs must do so because preceding events force it to. We think we have free will only because we comprehend the sequence of actions that are taken to get where we are now. We often don't even truly know why we do them. There is however, the possibility that a God could give free will, and change the direction, speed, and actions of subatomic particles which would in turn change events and the universe undetected. 
 
Donovan J. Arnold

From: Joe Campbell <philosopher.joe at gmail.com>
To: Moscow Vision 2020 <vision2020 at moscow.com> 
Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2012 11:49 PM
Subject: [Vision2020] Philosophical question

I find it interesting that in the history of philosophy some terms
have undergone substantive change while others meet with resistance
and folks clammer for their expulsion. For instance, "knowledge" had
gone substantive change. Back in Descartes day it meant infallible
certainty but few understand it that way now. Before we made the move
from an infallible to a fallible conception of knowledge -- where
evidence no longer entailed that something was known, just made it
highly probable -- no one suggested that we jettison the term because
infallible knowledge was deemed improbable. We merely changed our
conception of knowledge, grew to adopt a better, more realistic
understanding of what knowledge really is.

Yet with other terms this is not so. For instance, everyone and his
brother is writing a book about the end of free will (see Sam Harris
for instance). But if you read closely it is pretty clear that they
straddle the term "free will" with a set of unobtainable qualities. In
order to have free will, the entire causal sequence must trace back to
the agent; determinism (or even universal causation) must be false;
influence must be entirely from within the agent, and have no causal
link to the outside world; a free act can't even have a proponderence
of reason in its favor, for reasons too have a compulsive feature to
them. How isn't this just has much of a pipe dream as the Cartesian
concept of knowledge?

Why in the one case do we keep the term and change our conception of
it yet in the latter we want to get rid of them both? And once we get
rid of the term "free will" what will we replace it with? What term
will we know use to try to distinguish those of us who have control
over our actions from those of us that don't? Surely this is a helpful
distinction.

=======================================================
List services made available by First Step Internet,
serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
              http://www.fsr.net
          mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
=======================================================
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20120801/e0553ce8/attachment.html>