Author: John Fischer

I do not want to distract us from the “heavy” (no pun intended) issues to…

Interesting show on Schopenhauer. Here is a way of thinking about our commonsense asymmetric attitudes…

I admit it: I’ve been reading a lot of Schopenhauer, especially his Essays on Pessimism. They are fascinating, and extremely beautifully (and of course provocatively) written. Here’s a cheery and lovely passage: “Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means. Nevertheless, every man desires to reach old age; in other words, a state of life of which it may be siad; ‘It is bad to-day, and it will be worse to0morrow; and so on till the worst of all.”

During the call-in component of the show, Mohan asked a question about the relationship between…

Poor compatibilism. It is actually not all that bad, and it is defended by very able philosophers, such as my colleague, Gary Watson. But recall that I am a semicompatibilist. I do not think that freedom to do otherwise (regulative control) is compatible with causal determinism. But I do think that causal determinism is compatible with acting freely (guidance control).

John Locke came up with the original “Frankfurt-type example”.  (The examples have been called “Frankfurt-type…