9 ideas
3444 | If actions are not caused by other events, and are not causeless, they must be caused by the person [Chisholm] |
Full Idea: If the action is not caused by some other event, and it is not causeless, this leaves the possibility that it is caused by something else instead, and this something can only be the agent, the man. | |
From: Roderick Chisholm (Human Freedom and the Self [1964], p.28) |
3446 | For Hobbes (but not for Kant) a person's actions can be deduced from their desires and beliefs [Chisholm] |
Full Idea: According to Hobbes, if we fully know what a man desires and believes, and we know the state of his physical stimuli, we may logically deduce what he will try to do. But Kant says no such statements can ever imply what a man will do. | |
From: Roderick Chisholm (Human Freedom and the Self [1964], p.32) |
9268 | If free will miraculously interrupts causation, animals might do that; why would we want to do it? [Frankfurt on Chisholm] |
Full Idea: Chisholm holds the quaint doctrine that human freedom entails an absence of causal determination; a free action is a miracle. This gives no basis for doubting that animals have such freedom; and why would we care whether we can interrupt the causal order? | |
From: comment on Roderick Chisholm (Human Freedom and the Self [1964]) by Harry G. Frankfurt - Freedom of the Will and concept of a person §IV | |
A reaction: [compressed] Chisholm is the spokesman for 'agent causation', Frankfurt for freedom as second-level volitions. I'm with Frankfurt. The belief in 'agents' and 'free will' may sound plausible, until the proposal is spelled out in causal terms. |
3442 | Responsibility seems to conflict with events being either caused or not caused [Chisholm] |
Full Idea: The free will problem is that humans seem to be responsible, but this seems to conflict with the idea that every event is caused by some other event, and it also conflicts with the view that the action is not caused at all. | |
From: Roderick Chisholm (Human Freedom and the Self [1964], p.24) |
3443 | Desires may rule us, but are we responsible for our desires? [Chisholm] |
Full Idea: If a flood of desires causes a weak-willed man to give in to temptation, …the question now becomes, is he responsible for the beliefs and desires he happens to have? | |
From: Roderick Chisholm (Human Freedom and the Self [1964], p.25) |
3445 | Causation among objects relates either events or states [Chisholm] |
Full Idea: Between natural objects we may say that causation is a relation between events or states of affairs. | |
From: Roderick Chisholm (Human Freedom and the Self [1964], p.28) |
4398 | An event causes another just if the second event would not have happened without the first [Lewis, by Psillos] |
Full Idea: Lewis gives an account of causation in terms of counterfactual conditionals (roughly, an event c causes an event e iff if c had not happened then e would not have happened either). | |
From: report of David Lewis (works [1973]) by Stathis Psillos - Causation and Explanation Intro | |
A reaction: This feels wrong to me. It is a version of Humean constant conjunction, but counterfactuals are too much a feature of our minds, and not sufficiently a feature of the world, to do this job. Tricky. |
20972 | Joule showed that energy converts to heat, and heat to energy [Joule, by Papineau] |
Full Idea: James Joule established the equivalence of heat and mechanical energy, in the sense of showing that a specific amount of heat will always be produced by the expenditure of a given amount of energy, and vice versa. | |
From: report of James Joule (works [1870]) by David Papineau - Thinking about Consciousness App 4.2 | |
A reaction: This was a major step towards the law of conservation of energy. |
20645 | Heat is a state of vibration, not a substance [Joule] |
Full Idea: We consider heat not as a substance but as a state of vibration. | |
From: James Joule (works [1870]), quoted by Peter Watson - Convergence 01 'Nature's' | |
A reaction: The puzzle is that giving accurate accounts of vibrations, heat and movement require a quantitative substance, energy. But all we have here is movement, and the denial of a substance. Energy is 'nature's currency system'. |