Happy Holidays

Judging by the recent lack of activity, people have probably already gone on vacation from philosophy for a few weeks. I'm about to do the same myself, but before I go, I wanted to say two things:

First, we seem to be having the same comment problem that PEA Soup describes here. I'll try to check the spam filter for stray comments over the next couple of weeks, but my internet access will be intermittent, so just be patient if your comment doesn't appear immediately.

Second, I wish everyone a happy holidays! See you next year.

Comments

[John Fischer]

DARN! I had just completed a long, thorough, detailed, careful post in which I solve all the important free will problems. Now I'll just have to trash it. In the post, among other things, I offered decisive and knockdown reasons for:

everyone to accept semicompatibilism;

Kip, Tamler, Saul, and Galen Strawson to accept that moral responsibility is perfectly coherent, once it is understood properly;

Manuel to revise his revisionism, and realize that semicompatibilism is all the revisionism that's worth caring about;

PvI to accept the incoherent rather than the merely mysterious (or something like that);

Randy to come all the way into the light, now that he has taken baby steps out of the darkness;

Derk to stop looking for love in all the wrong places;

Al to stick out his neck just a LITTLE bit and take the leap to compatibilism;

Shaun to say, "Who the f... cares what the folk think, anyway";

Adina to become a dualist;

Daniel Dennett to stop being a duellist;

Fritz to admit that PvI is not right about every single thing in philosophy;

Tim Scanlon to refer to me just once, JUST ONCE...;

Michael Bratman to stop thinking about the future and live for the moment;

Eddy to abjure all empirically informed philosophy on behalf of a life of aesceticism and pure apriori reflection, combined with granola;

Speaking of which, Mark Ravizza to come back to the sane world of academic philosophy and stop the silly and misguided attempt to help needy people in Central America. Or better: to seek to bring them the Doctrine of Semicompatibilism...

Michael McKenna to stop making us all realize that you can both be super-cool and a great philiosopher, despite our rationalizations...

Tim O to stop expecting us all to be Timocrats...

Gary W to admit that my compatibilism is better than his compatibilism...

[I'd better stop before I get into even more deep S...]

HAPPY HOLIDAYS to all who make the Garden such a great place, and who help to keep it fertilized.

John

[John Fischer]

Oh, I forgot. I also had arguments for:

Meghan to give up her quest to become the second famous living philosopher who is an Agent Causationist;

Ted Honderich to give up the slightly less friendly terrain of philosophy of mind and come back to his home in Free Will;

Dan Speak to agree with one thing I've said, ONE THING. After all, Dan, I WAS your supervisor;

Matt Talbert, the Mighty Mountaineer, to give up Hard-Ass Compatibilism for (at least) Semi-Hard-Ass Compatibilism;

Ok, that's all I can remember from the ill-fated post. DID ANYONE ELSE OUT THERE HAVE SUCH A POST, BEFORE NEAL QUASHED OUR PLANS??

[Fritz Warfield]

John,
you've already got your wish with me: I agreed with you, against PvI, that not all "plausible" arguments for incompatibilism rely on a "transfer of necessity of principle". And I also took your side against him in the "frequency of freedom" debate -- I don't think exercises of libertarian freedom are "rare". That's *two* disagreements with Peter just about freedom issues. If we turn to other topics in *philosophy*, as your wish more broadly put it, well, he's an open future guy...but let's not get started on that.

[Manuel]

Well, I can see why the typepad filters must have thought John's original remarks were spam! I've gotten more plausible emails from the spouse of a former Nigerian embassador looking to give me money. :-)

Merry Holidays and Happy Vacation to everyone. And best wishes to everyone who is attending the Eastern in any capacity.

[Dan]

I've agreed with many of your sushi choices, John.

[John Fischer]

Dan, I think we can all concede that when you and I agree about an argument, there must be something fishy about it...

[Alan]

My 101 course is a single-topic approach to philosophy based on the topic of free will. (Martin Benjamin, e.g., has graciously included my pubs on this in his grad seminar on teaching philosophy for many years, bless his heart.) In its 120th + incarnation this semester, I entered the classroom in my final lecture to see "421" written large on the blackboard. I asked what this meant--to find that my students had conspired to actually count the number of times I used (and/or, I gather, mentioned) the term "free will" over the semester! They had actually shared the task so that the count would continue should one main counter be absent a particular day. I was astounded. Now you must understand that many days I am teaching spacetime diagrams of the events of human nature, philosophy of law, logical vs real possibility, etc, etc, where the phrase never passes my lips. So--the number of such utterances was beyond my ability (opportunities aside) to guess! The final tally at the end of the last day (I asked)--439.

After 26 and 1/2 years, I am still astounded by what students do (and--don't do)!!

Have a restful holiday season everyone!

[Saul Smilansky]

John,

I already think that compatibilism is coherent; it is even partly true, as far as it goes. The only problem is that it doesn't go very far...

Anyway, season's greetings to all and may your wishes be fulfilled , given that they are not unreasonably immoral and are consistent with a similar level of wish-fulfillment for others - except if your wises are contradictory, self-defeating, or harmful to your own second-order preferences, in which case may you get the best overall combination.

[Randy Clarke]

John,

I'm living in the Sunshine State now. Happy New Year!

[Eddy Nahmias]

John, I have accepted your holiday wish and been doing only pure a priori reflection for the past week (combined with granola) and such reflection has led me inexorably to the logically necessary conclusion that any interesting or important philosophical theory or conclusion must be informed by relevant empirical information--oh, and that there is always *some* relevant empirical information. Unfortunately, since this conclusion was reached without any empirical information, it must not be very interesting or important. Happy New Year!

[John Fischer]

Eddy,

My recommendation would be to stop the granola--it might be distorting the reflection...

Randy,

Remember: sunshine an compatibilism exhibit a high degree of correlation.

Happy new year (almost) to everyone!

[Neil]

John wrote:

Happy new year (almost) to everyone!

and I read it as "Happy new year to (almost) everyone!"

Not that I'm paranoid or anything...

[John Fischer]

Right, Neil, it should have been: Happy Almost New Year to (of course) eveyone!!

Meanwhile, I apologize for not singling you out for mischaracterizationi of your views or gratuitious and unfair insult...

[Neil]

Meanwhile, I apologize for not singling you out for mischaracterizationi of your views or gratuitious and unfair insult...

Don't worry John, you will...