Exam 6: John Locke Free Agents

d'Holbach criticizes his opponents when he says, "They have believed that the soul is mistress of its own conduct, is able to regulate its own peculiar operations, has the faculty to determine its will by its own natural energy; in a word, they have pretended that man is a free agent."

d'Holbach criticizes his opponents when he says, "They have believed that the soul is mistress of its own conduct, is able to regulate its own peculiar operations, has the faculty to determine its will by its own natural energy; in a word, they have pretended that man is ..."

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 spontaneity.

Taylor says, "that there is an essential difference between my moving my finger, and my finger merely moving, and, hence, that 'I can move my finger' expresses not merely the idea that any motions of my finger are abstractly contingent but, rather, that it is forcefully contingent whether I produce them."

Spinoza says, "Thus the mind and the body stand in the same relation to this or that idea, or this or that volition, as 'man' to Peter and Paul."

Explain why God says the following: "sinning is not the real issue! The important thing is that people as well as other sentient beings don't get hurt."

Sartre says, "When a man commits himself to anything, fully realizing that he is not only choosing what he will be, but is thereby at the same time a legislator deciding for the whole of mankind-in such a moment a man cannot escape from the sense of complete and profound responsibility." For Sartre, this defines the concept of abandonment.

Sartre says, "There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity. This relation of transcendence as constitutive of man (not in the sense that God is transcendent, but in the sense of self-surpassing) with subjectivity (in such a sense that man is not shut up in himself but forever present in a human universe)-it is this that we call existential humanism."

Taylor criticizes the position that says, "if I am asked by the physician whether I can move my finger and I reply that I can, then what I am telling him, if 'can' here (as in the stone and egg case) expresses a hypothetical possibility, is that if there should occur within me a certain (unnamed) event or state, then the finger motion would at once follow as a causal consequence."

In the reading, God says, "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 ..."

In the reading, God says that "sinning is not the real issue! The important thing is that people as well as other sentient beings don't get hurt."

Foot says, "We hold responsible only a man who is _________________; if someone were always to do things out of the blue, without having any reason to do them, we should be inclined to count him as a lunatic, one who could not be held responsible for his actions, so that even if he did things he would do things for which he could not be held responsible."

d'Holbach asserts that "From all that has been advanced, it results, that in no one moment of his existence is man _____________. 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."

Taylor says, "I conclude, then, that 'can,' in the statement 'I can move my finger,' does not mean what it ever means when applied to physical things." Do you agree with Taylor? Explain your answer.

Foot considers the following idea: "if human action is subject to a universal law of causation [then] there will be for any action a set of sufficient conditions which can be traced back to factors outside the control of the agent." This is regarded as a definition of determinism.

According to Foot, "to explain an action is not necessarily to show that it could have been suppressed 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 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 ..."

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 ...

d'Holbach says, "if at this moment it is announced to him that the water he so ardently desires is poisoned, he will, notwithstanding his vehement thirst, abstain from drinking it: and it has, therefore, been falsely concluded that he is a free agent. The fact, however, is, that the _________ in either case is exactly the same: his own conservation."

Foot relates that "an action which is not determined cannot properly be called an action at all, being something that happened to the agent rather than something he acquired."