Philosophy Final Exam

Nurture- upbringing
Social environment- past experience
physical environment
physical laws of nature
logic
God- the future couldn't be otherwise than God Knows it to be
-God creates nature; things act in accordance w/nature

1. We desire to control ourselves - not to be controlled by unknown factors

2. Undermines our sense of purpose

3. In what sense can we hold people responsible for their action if they didn't choose them?

An event (such as a choice or action) is determined when there are conditions obtaining earlier (such as the decrees of fate or the foreordaining acts of God or antecedent causes plus laws of nature) whose occurrence is a sufficient condition for the occurrence of the even in other words, it must be the case that, if these earlier determining conditions obtain, then the determinded event will occcur.

>Fate
>Scientific or mechanistic forces - given the state of affairs at the time "t" together w/ the laws of nature all future states of affairs follow necessarily.
>Psychological - decided by prior motives and character

God knows everything in the future- therefore the future cannot be anything than God knows it to be

-he creates all nature which determines action

The ability to act or choose in accordant with my desires
>This entails/demands the absence of external coercion. restraint or punishment
>We feel it is "up to us" what we choose and how we act; and this means we could have chosen or acted otherwise
>The ultimate sources of out actions lie in us and not outside us in factors beyond our control

1. Human being have the power to be the ultimate creators (or originators) and sustainers oftheir own ends and purposes
2. Entails that alternate possibilities are genuinely open

Deny determinism and affirm free will

Affirm deternimism and deny free will

Believe in determinism, are compatibalists who insist that determinism does not undermine any free will worth having

The View that there really is no conflict between determinism and free will - that free will and determinsim are compatible

popular: because provides what seems to be a neat, simple solution to the free will problem

Compatibilists have a twofold response to the objection that their view accounts only for freedom of action but not for freedom of will. On the one hand they say, if "freedom of will" means what we ordinarily mena by free choices or decisions, then freedom of will can also be given a compatibilist anyalysis and can htus be see to be compatible with determinism. On the other hand, it "freedom of will" has a stronger meaning- if it refers to some kind of "deeper" freedom of will that is not compatible iwth determinism- then that deeper freedom of will is incoherent and is not something we cna have anyway.

What each of us has to do, in order to develop our powers as independent reasonsers and so to flourish qua members of our species is to make the transition form accepting what we are taught by those earliest theachers to making our own independent judgements about goods, judgements that we are able to justify rationally to ourselves and to thers as furnishings us with good reasons for actingin this wasy rather than that.

Help make us independent practical reasoners

allows you to do what you are supposed to do well

What a child who is making the transition from the infantile exercise of animal intelligen to the exercise of independent practical reasoning has to achieve is a transformation of her or his motivational set, so that what we were origionally external reaosn become internal.