Exam 6: John Locke Free Agents

Sartre says, "Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing-as he wills to be after that leap towards existence."

According to Sartre, "If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, 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."

Sartre says "that we limit ourselves to a reliance upon that which is within our wills, or within the sum of the probabilities which render our action feasible. Whenever one wills anything, there are always these elements of probability." For Sartre, this defines the concept of hope.

Taylor says that his examples show that "the relation expressed in the hypothetical 'I will move my finger if I want to' is, if the hypothetical is true at all, a logical relationship between concepts, resting only on a conventional equivalence of meaning, and as such cannot be a causal relationship between states or events." Do you agree with Taylor? Explain your answer.

Sartre asserts, "that God does not exist, and that it is necessary to draw the consequences of his absence right to the end. The existentialist is strongly opposed to a certain type of secular moralism which seeks to suppress God at the least possible expense." For Sartre, this defines the concept of ...

Explain the following claim: "that so far from being incompatible with determinism, free will actually requires it." Do you agree with this claim? Explain your answer.

According to Sartre, what existentialists "have in common is simply the fact that they believe that essence comes before existence, or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective."

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

Sartre says, "Man is, indeed, a project which possesses a subjective life, instead of being a kind of moss, or a fungus or a cauliflower. Before that projection of the self nothing exists; not even in the heaven of intelligence: man will only attain existence when he is what he purposes to be . . . Thus, the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is"; in other words, Humans have the illusion of freedom.

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

In the reading, God says, "All I have said is that from the fact that you are talking to yourself one cannot possibly infer my nonexistence, let alone the weaker fact that you are not talking to me."

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 entailment."

Sartre says, "Man is, indeed, a project which possesses a subjective life, instead of being a kind of moss, or a fungus or a cauliflower. Before that projection of the self nothing exists; not even in the heaven of intelligence: man will only attain existence when he is what he purposes to be . . . Thus, the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is"; in other words,

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 coherency, which I shall call logical, causal, and epistemic."

In the reading, God says, "All I have said is that from the fact that you are talking to yourself one cannot possibly infer my _____________, let alone the weaker fact that you are not talking to me."

Taylor says, "What else is meant by 'can,' in addition to meaning that my moving my finger is causally contingent, is suggested by what was just said; namely, that whether or not I do move my finger is up to me."

According to Locke, "freedom consists in the dependence of the existence, or not existence of any action, upon our volition of it; and not in the dependence of any action, or its contrary, on our preference." Do you agree with Locke's definition of "freedom"?

In the reading, God says, "I could no more choose to give you free will than I could choose to make an equilateral triangle equiangular. I could choose to make or not to make an equilateral triangle in the first place, but having chosen to make one, I would then have no choice but to make it equiangular." To this the mortal responds, "I thought you could do anything!" To which God says, "Only things which are morally perfect."

In the reading, the mortal says that "Evil temptations come along, and try as I can, I cannot resist them." To which God responds, "If it is really true that you cannot resist them, then you are not sinning of your own free will and hence (at least according to me) not sinning at all."

What is Sartre's definition of "existential humanism"?