When we seek to understand something unlike our everyday world, we rely on the known to make comparisons with and render intelligible the unknown. But the more remote our object is from our study, the more our everyday concepts used in these comparisons will fall short. And the more they fall short, the more we will be forced to use paradox to form concepts of that which is foreign to our everyday world. Paradox is a platform/Spielraum on which we stand so that we may gaze at novel forms.
Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson. He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal. My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this. I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true. Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist. In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
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