Exam 6: John Locke Free Agents

Explain what Sartre means when he says, "Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimize our behavior. Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free." Do you agree with Sartre? Explain your answer.

d'Holbach says, "Action always being the effect of his will once determined, and as his will cannot be determined but by a motive which is not in his own power, it follows that he is never the master of the determination of his own peculiar will; that consequently he never acts as an agnostic."

Sartre says, "We can begin by saying that materialism, in our sense of the word, is a doctrine that does render human life possible; a doctrine, also, which affirms that every truth and every action imply both an environment and a human subjectivity."

What is Sartre's definition of "despair"?

Sartre says, "______________________, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it."

According to Locke, "willing is an act of the mind directing its thought to the production of any action, and thereby exerting its power to produce it."

According to Sartre, "If man as the existentialist sees him is not __________, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself."

Taylor is critical of the position that says, "that 'I can' expresses the idea of a causal relationship in which a very special kind of ____________ fills the role of the cause-namely, a certain kind of mental thrust or internal urging, well known to metaphysicians and philosophers of the mind as an act of will or a volition."

d'Holbach asserts that "This is a principle the truth of which no thinking being will be able to refuse accrediting: his life is a series of recurring spaces; his conduct, whether good or bad, virtuous or vicious, useful or prejudicial, either to himself or to others, is a concatenation of action."

Explain what Locke means when he says, "What is it determines the will? The true and proper answer is, the mind. For that which determines the general power of directing, to this or that particular direction, is nothing but the agent itself exercising the power it has that particular way."

In the reading, the mortal says, "You mean there is nothing satisfactory you can now do, that does not mean that there is nothing you could have done." To which God responds, "What could I have done?" To this the mortal says "You should not have created the devil to tempt humans."

Taylor says that the three statements, "1. A billiard ball can be both round and red (but not round and square); 2. (Lucretius thought that) atoms can swerve from their paths; and 3. This can be the restaurant we ate in long ago" are "all the philosophically significant senses of 'can' as applied to physical objects, and these are, respectively, three senses of ___________, which I shall call logical, causal, and epistemic."

Locke says that the "power which the mind has thus to order the consideration of any idea, or the forbearing to consider it; or to prefer the motion of any part of the body to its rest, and vice versa, in any particular instance, is that which we call the Understanding."

Explain God's meaning in this statement: "I think the most accurate and fruitful definition of me which man can frame-at least in his present state of evolution-is that I am the very process of enlightenment."

According to Spinoza, since everything that happens in our minds is determined by some cause, which has been itself determined by another cause, therefore, everything happens out of ...

Foot says, "Assigning a motive to an action is not bringing it under any law; it is rather saying something about the kind of action it was, the direction in which it was tending, or what it was done ..."

d'Holbach says, "It is, then, for want of recurring to the causes that move him; for want of being able to analyze, from not being competent to decompose the complicated motion of his machine, that man believes himself a free agent: it is only upon his own ignorance that he founds the profound yet deceitful notion he has of his free agency; that he builds those opinions which he brings forward as a striking proof of his pretended freedom of action."

According to Locke, "willing is an act of the mind directing its thought to the production of any action, and thereby exerting its power to produce it." Do you agree with Locke's definition of "willing"?

Explain what Foot means when she says, "to explain an action is not necessarily to show that it could have been predicted from some fact about the agent's character-that he is weak, greedy, sentimental, and so forth. We may if we like say that an action is never fully explained unless it has been shown to be covered by a law which connects it to such a character trait."

d'Holbach asserts that "From all that has been advanced, it results, that in no one moment of his existence is man a free agent. He is not the architect of his own conformation, which he holds from nature; he has no control over his own ideas, or over the modification of his brain."