Dear class: Sorry I missed today’s class. I had an urgent personal problem to attend to.
Let me address our test Monday. The topics are up.
There couple of things I want to come back to:
1- Traditional Compatibilism. Remember that they maintain that determinism and free will are compatible. How? Our DNA, brain, social conditioning, etc, cause our mental states. They become Nagel properties (subjective 1st person reports) that the subject acts upon. It’s in this sense that one is free. Free will is expressed as a tree of possibilities. Suppose you have a node with (a) and (b) options. You are free at (b) provided you could’ve taken (a) and didn’t. It’s in this sense that they say you’re free if you could’ve done otherwise. The Traditional Compatibilist
2- Sartre’s Existentialism & the issue of facticity. Facticity is the external impediments one is not responsible for. They are very few: Your parents, DNA, name, culture embeddedness (at least the formative years). Everything else you are responsible for, including being responsible for the forthcoming hurricane coming through Florida. Why? Because you choose to live here. A student in my 10 am honors class asked me if the laws of nature are facticity. The answer is yes. Anything that constrains your free will is facticity.
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