Hello everyone On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 4:55 PM, Steven Peterson <[email protected]> wrote: > His all, > > Where did this question of free will versus determinism originate in > the history of philosophy? I've been thinking of free will as a > Christian theology "extra-added ingredient" to each human animal that > is used to explain the problem of evil (unsatisfactorily). Theologians > needed this term to answer those who thought deeply enough to ask, > yeah, okay, evil came from Satan, but where did Satan come from? If if > all philosophy is footnotes to Plato, perhaps the issue is older than > Christian theology.
Hi Steve There is an article in the SEP concerning free will vs determinism... maybe you've read it: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/ I think Robert Pirsig's solution is unique in that it states that free will and determinism are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are both correct. He goes on to show how, within the framework of the MOQ, when we follow static quality patterns our behaviour is without choice. But when we follow Dynamic Quality, we are free. Reading over the article in the SEP, I came across many competing ideas that seem to be united under the umbrella of the Metaphysics of Quality. It seems a bit of a pity that the author of the article didn't see fit to include Robert Pirsig's work in the final analysis. Thank you, Dan PS I am guessing all the major religions use the notions of free will and determinism to explain the problem of good vs evil. That would seem to point to previous religious ideas far older than our "modern" ones, from which they are all descended. . Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
