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The Metaphysics of Free Will: An
Essay on Control - John Martin Fischer, 1996 - expect rcv June 2001
Metaphilosophy and Free Will -
Richard Double, 1996 - expect recv July/Aug 2001
God, Foreknowledge, and Freedom -
John Martin Fischer (ed.), 1992 - expect rcv June 2001
Free Will and Illusion - Saul
Smilansky, 2000 - looks good, expensive ($67)
Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics
of Free Will - Timothy O'Connor, 2000 - emergent freewill?
The End of Time: The Next
Revolution in Physics - Julian Barbour, 2000 - I have it
I expect to receive Jun 2001
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by John Martin Fischer
Amazon Price: $32.95
Paperback (May 1996)
Blackwell Pub; ISBN: 1557868573 ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.88 x 9.01 x 6.02
although we naturally assume that we have control of our
behaviour and are morally responsible agents, the assumption that we have this
sort of control can be called into question. Arguments can be made that if,
say, causal determinism obtains or God exists, we lack this sort of control.
And it is not absolutely evident that causal determinism is false and God does
not exist. Thus, some of the most important and fundamental features of our
lives can be put in doubt. Fischer attempts to protect us from these skeptical
doubts by setting out new arguments about the nature of free will and
control. His view suggests that we can be confident of our moral
responsibility and personhood even if causal determinism turned out to be true
or God were to exist.
Fischer (philosophy, U. of California, Riverside) argues
that we have the sort of control over our behavior that grounds moral
responsibility, identifies the type of control that is associated with
personhood and accountability, and shows how it is consistent with causal
determinism, or God's existence. He shows how our view of ourselves as morally
responsible agents can be protected against the challenges posed by science and
religion.
[this is a very mundane position -- this is merely conventional hard determinism, with a positive attitude that may actually be the norm for hard determinists - so we can say that his position is merely the determinist one. Most plain-and-straight determinists agree with all he said.]
Fischer argues "that free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism: even if people lack metaphysical freedom to do otherwise, as a causally determined view of reality would imply, they can still be morally responsible. ... if one has 'guidance' control of one's actions, so that one's decisions are responsive to reasons in the right way, one can be morally accountable. The [metaphysical] impossibility of alternatives is not important." (Times Lit Suppl)
From A.R. Mele - Choice:
Fischer (Univ. of California--Riverside) provides a thorough statement of the major grounds for skepticism about the reality of free will and moral responsibility and develops a detailed, plausible rebuttal. . . . He distinguishes between two species of control--regulative control and guidance control. Having regulative control over our behavior requires that . . . more than one future is open to us. Guidance control, exhibited when our actions appropriately issue from our responsiveness to reasons, does not require this. . . . {Fischer} argues persuasively that {guidance} control . . . is compatible both with determinism and with the existence of a God possessed of perfect foreknowledge. [single, closed, fixed, even preexistent future - mh] This is an excellent book. . . . Its combination of thoroughness and accessibilty is rare in the literature on free will. The arguments are skillfully crafted and sometimes stunningly ingenious.
From Saul Smilansky - The Times Literary Supplement:
It is a commonplace of our era that philosophy does not get anywhere. And among philosophical issues, the free-will problem is the classic example 'of an insoluble, hopeless' problem. John Martin Fischer's carefully argued book shows, however, that this is not really so. . . . This is not an easy book. . . . Even trained philosophers may find it hard going, especially in the middle. . . . Fischer's intellectual integrity must be commended, however. He takes no short cuts, is at pains to explain the views of his opponents, and signals when he is unsure. . . . Fischer does much to provide [hierarchical?] compatibilism with a limited basis. . . at the level of metaphysics and action theory. As he shows, we can understand the ground for certain compatibilist distinctions. But it is doubtful . . . whether his general project succeeds.
From Booknews:
Fischer (philosophy, U. of California, Riverside) argues that we have the sort of control over our behavior that grounds moral responsibility, identifies the type of control that is associated with personhood and accountability, and shows how it is consistent with causal determinism, or God's existence [that is, the fixed, closed, even preexisting future?]. He shows how our view of ourselves as morally responsible agents can be protected against the challenges posed by science and religion. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Acknowledgments
1 The Issues 1
2 The Transfer Principle: Its Plausibility 23
3 The Transfer Principle: Its Role 46
4 The Laws and the Past: The Conditional Version of the Argument 67
5 The Basic Version and Newcomb's Problem 87
6 The Facts 111
7 Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities 131
8 Moral Responsibility and Guidance Control 160
9 Putting it Together 190
Notes 217
Fischer Bibliography 254
Bibliography 256
Index 265
bn page for hardcover
by John Martin Fischer, Mark Ravizza
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Format: Hardcover, 287pp.
ISBN: 0521480558
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Pub. Date: February 1998
Format: Paperback, 1st ed., 287pp.
ISBN: 0521775795
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Pub. Date: February 2000
bn page for paperback - $22
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This book provides a comprehensive, systematic theory of moral responsibility. The authors explore the conditions under which individuals are morally responsible for actions, omissions, consequences, and emotions. The leading idea in the book is that moral responsibility is based on "guidance control." This control has two components: the mechanism that issues in the relevant behavior must be the agent's own mechanism, and it must be appropriately responsive to reasons. The book develops on account of both components. The authors go on to offer a sustained defense of the thesis that moral responsibility is compatible with causal determinism. This major study will interest moral philosophers, legal theorists, and those in religious studies concerned with the issue of moral responsibility.
Responsibility and Control is a work of enormous breadth, depth and significance. It is a careful, creative and thorough treatment of the concept of moral responsibility. In many ways, the most systematic discussion of moral responsibility currently available and very likely the best as well. -- Jules Coleman, Yale Law School —Jules Coleman
...presents in a clear way a plausible, general approach to foundational issues about moral responsibility. -- Michael Bratman, Stanford University —Michael Bratman
This book offers the most thorough and well-worked-out compatibilist analysis of moral responsibility that I'm aware of. Its style strikes a nice balance between readibility and rigor and should be quite accessible to thinkers who are not already well-versed in the philosophical literature about responsibility. -- Carl Ginet, Cornell University —Ginet
Acknowledgments
1 Moral Responsibility: The Concept and the Challenges 1
2 Moral Responsibility for Actions: Weak Reasons-Responsiveness 28
3 Moral Responsibility for Actions: Moderate Reasons-Responsiveness 62
4 Responsibility for Consequences 92
5 Responsibility for Omissions 123
6 The Direct Argument for Incompatibilism 151
7 Responsibility and History 170
8 Taking Responsibility 207
9 Conclusion 240
Bibliography 261
Index 271
by Richard Double
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Hardcover - 192 pages (September 1996)
Oxford Univ Pr on Demand; ISBN: 0195107624 ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.66 x 8.53 x 5.77
the author looks at the contending schools of thought on the
problem of free will and seeks the source of the current impasse. He argues
that the free will problem is intractable because free will theorists are
separated by metaphilosophical differences in the way they view the philosophical
enterprise itself. [agreed! they are the emotional worriers, more
interested in gluing society together than intellectual coherence -- they
*want* freedom and free moral agency.] The book begins by distinguishing the
principal contemporary metaphilosophies. It goes on to apply these
metaphilosophies to the free will problem and to the problem of the
objectivity of value (which, the author believes, is closely related to the
free will problem). He champions one of these metaphilosophies, which he
names "World-view construction as Continuous with Science".
Applied to the free will and objectivity of value problems, his metaphilosophy
yields the conclusion that free will and moral responsibility do not exist.
Statements about what actions are "free" or "responsible",
says the author, express attitudes and values but do not have objective
truth value. In fact, values in general are subjective and statements
about them have no objective truth value. He goes on to make the wider
claim that all of the metaphilosophical positions adopted by philosophers,
including his own, are based on subjective considerations, not objective
ones.
Why is debate over the free will problem so intractable? In
this broad and stimulating look at the philosophical enterprise, Richard Double
uses the free will controversy to build on the subjectivist conclusion he
developed in The Non-Reality of Free Will (OUP 1991). Double argues that
various views about free will--e.g., compatibilism, incompatibilism, and even
subjectivism--are compelling if, and only if, we adopt supporting
metaphilosophical views. Because metaphilosophical considerations are not
provable, we cannot show any free will theory to be most reasonable.
Metaphilosophy and Free Will deconstructs the free will problem and, by
example, challenges philosophers in other areas to show how their philosophical
argumentation can succeed.
[this sounds like a truly innovative book, explaining the impasse is about *attitudes* and extra-philosophical motivations. - mh]
publisher:
Why is debate over the free will problem so intractable? This question forms the starting point for Richard Double's ground-breaking account of the way metaphilosophical views - our differing conceptions of the philosophical enterprise - condition competing theories of free will. Double holds that any argument for or against a specific free will position - such as compatibilism, incompatibilism, or the author's own subjectivism - will be persuasive only if one adopts supporting meta-level views of what philosophy is. He argues further that since metaphilosophical considerations are not provable (and are not even true or false, if subjectivism is true), there can be no hope of showing one free will theory to be more reasonable than the rest. Rather, the most philosophers can do is make a desire-based case for preferring their package of metaphilosophy and substantive free will theories. These means that argument in the free will problem must be radically reinterpreted. Double begins by elaborating the connection between metaphilosophy and free will. He identifies four distinct meta-level viewpoints that drive different answers to the free will problem: Philosophy as Conversation; Philosophy as Praxis; Philosophy as Underpinnings; and Philosophy as World View Construction. From there, he discusses intermediate-level principles that work in combination with the meta-philosophies, then provides ten applications from recent free will debates that demonstrate how differences in meta-philosophy make the free will problem unsolvable. In the second half of the book Double makes the strongest case he can - consistent with his own metaphilosophical view - for accepting free will subjectivism.
1 Introduction 3
2 Metaphilosophies 17
3 Intermediate-Level Philosophical Principles 40
4 How the Free Will Debate Depends on Metaphilosophy (I) 56
5 How the Free Will Debate Depends on Metaphilosophy (II) 77
6 How to Frame the Free Will Problem 99
7 The Fragmentation of Free Will 109
8 Free Will Is a Moral Concept 126
9 Hume's Principle: The Subjectivity of Moral Responsibility and Free Will 143
10 Conclusion 156
References 167
Index 173
God, Foreknowledge, and Freedom (Stanford Series in Philosophy)
by John Martin Fischer (Editor)
List Price: $19.95
Paperback Reprint edition (August 1992)
Stanford Univ Pr; ISBN: 0804721556 ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.81 x 8.48 x 5.50
In 1965, Nelson Pike published his paper "Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action," in which he attempted to show that these two things were ultimately incompatible: if God has complete foreknowledge of everything we will do, our actions aren't really "voluntary" since we weren't free to do otherwise. That set off some dialogue that took place in scattered journals over the next twenty-five years. John Martin Fischer has here collected the major rounds of this dialogue into a single volume and added a helpful introduction. The papers collected in this volume address Pike's claim, and argument, that God's _foreknowledge_ is not compatible with human freedom. The scope of this work does not extend to the question whether God's _causation_ of all events is thus compatible.
Includes Fischer's introduction and Pike's 1965 paper, together with the following:
· Marilyn McCord Adams, "Is the Existence of God a 'Hard' Fact?"
· John Martin Fischer, "Freedom and Foreknowledge"
· David Widerker, "Two Forms of Fatalism"
· Eddy Zemach and David Widerker, "Two Forms of Fatalism"
· Joshua Hoffman and Gary Rosenkrantz, "Hard and Soft Facts"
· Alfred J. Freddoso, "Accidental Necessity and Logical Determinism"
· William Hasker, "Hard Facts and Theological Fatalism"
· Alvin Plantinga, "On Ockham's Way Out"
· William Hasker, "Foreknowledge and Necessity"
· William P. Alston, "Divine Foreknowledge and Alternative Conceptions of Human Freedom"
· Martin Davies, "Boethius and Others on Divine Foreknowledge"
Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy
by Susanne Bobzien
$85.00 (Amazon: full price, not in stock. B&Noble, in stock for $80.75)
Hardcover (1998, March 1999)
456 pp.; 0-19-823794-4
Clarendon Pr; ISBN: 0198237944
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Format: Paperback, 456pp.
ISBN: 0199247676
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Pub. Date: September 2001
"The definitive study of one of the most interesting intellectual legacies of the ancient Greeks: the Stoic theory of causal determinism. She explains what it was, how the Stoics justified it, and how it relates to their views on possibility, action, freedom, moral responsibility, and many other topics. She demonstrates the considerable philosophical richness and power that these ideas retain today."
"The first comprehensive study of one of the most important intellectual legacies of the ancient Greek world: the Stoic theory of causal determinism. The book identifies the main problems that the Stoics addressed and reconstructs the theory, and explores how they squared their determinism with their conceptions of possibility, action, freedom, and moral responsibility, and how they defended it against objections and criticism by other philosophers."
"This is an awe-inspiring work....It is extraordinarily ambitious. It aims to recover and understand, so far as the sources allow, the entire early Stoic theory of fate, causal determinism, and responsibility. It achieves this ambition while at the same time showing how immensely more difficult the task is than anyone had appreciated before....It will most certainly be the first work that everybody interested has to get to grips with. They will have to start here both because the book is a model of scholarly method and because it is an outstanding example of lucid philosophical thinking in an area where clear thought is extremely difficult." -- Miles Burnyeat, All Souls College, Oxford
Introduction
1. Determinism and Fate
2. Two Chrysippean Arguments for Causal Determinism
3. Modality, Determinism, and Freedom
4. Divination, Modality,and Universal Regularity
5. Fate, Action, and Motivation: The Idle Argument
6. Determinism and Moral Responsibility: Chrysippus's Compatibilism
7. Freedom and that which Depends on us: Epictetus and Early Stoics
8. A Later Stoic Theory of Compatibilism
Bibliography; Indexes
by Richard Double
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Hardcover - 260 pages (January 1991)
Oxford Univ Pr on Demand; ISBN: 0195064976 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.00 x 8.61 x 5.82
offers an argument
concerning free will and moral responsibility which identifies hierarchical
compatibilism - a view espoused by such philosophers as Neely, Watson,
Levin and Dennett - as the most plausible account of free will. The author
explains how compatibilism can be successfully defended against incompatibilist
objections. The text goes on to demonstrate, however, that even the
compatibilist account of free ultimately faces insuperable objections, and
concludes with the observation that free will is an essentially incoherent
notion.
["compatibilism"
is usually just determinism renamed, since determinism never denies that we
make choices and can reasonably be called responsible agents. - mh]
The traditional disputants in the free will discussion--the libertarian, soft determinist, and hard determinist--agree that free will is a coherent concept, while disagreeing on how the concept might be satisfied and whether it can, in fact, be satisfied. In this innovative analysis, Richard Double offers a bold new argument, rejecting all of the traditional theories and proposing that the concept of free will cannot be satisfied, no matter what the nature of reality. Arguing that there is unavoidable conflict within our understanding of moral responsibility and free choice, Double seeks to prove that when we ascribe responsibility, blame, or freedom, we merely express attitudes, rather than state anything capable of truth or falsity. Free will, he concludes, is essentially an incoherent notion.
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The Implications of Determinism (The Problems of Philosophy)
by Roy Weatherford
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Library Binding - 240 pages (May 1991)
Routledge; ISBN: 0415033039
The problem of determinism arises in all the major areas of philosophy. From prophecy in Homer to sociobiology, the idea of inevitability has exerted a powerful influence on the course of philosophical thought. The first part of this book is a critical and historical exposition of the problem and important ideas and arguments which have arisen over the many years of debate. In the second, the author considers the various forms of determinism and the implications that they engender. He argues against the widespread assumption that quantum mechanics has disposed of the implications of determinism, and proposes that far from settling the question of the truth of determinism it has raised new issues for the moral question of human responsibility. Causation, God, free will, behaviourism, probability and personal identity are among the standard philosophical issues considered. Professor Weatherford interweaves themes from metaphysics, ethics, religion, common sense and quantum physics in this examination of determinism.
Michael J. White
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ISBN: 9027719683
Publisher: Kluwer Academic Publishers
Pub. Date: January 1985
by Saul Smilansky
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Hardcover (July 2000)
Oxford Univ Press; ISBN: 0198250185
The publisher, Oxford University Press , March 23, 2000
A striking and original study of the problem of free will...
Saul Smilansky presents an original new approach to the problem of free will,
which lies at the heart of morality and human self-understanding. He maintains
that the key to the problem is the role played by illusion. Smilansky's
bold claim is that we could not live adequately with a complete awareness of
the truth about human freedom: illusion lies at the centre of the human
condition.
by Derk Pereboom
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Hardcover (February 2001)
Cambridge Univ Pr (Short); ISBN: 0521791987
Most people assume that, even though some degenerative or
criminal behaviour may be caused by influences beyond our control, ordinary
human actions are not similarly generated, but rather are freely chosen, and we
can be praiseworthy or blameworthy for them. A less popular and more radical
claim is that factors beyond our control produce all of the actions we perform.
It is this hard determinist stance that Derk Pereboom articulates in
"Living Without Free Will". The author argues that our best
scientific theories indeed have the consequence that factors beyond our control
produce all of the actions we perform, and that because of this, we are not
morally responsible for any of them. He seeks to defend the view that morality,
meaning, and value remain intact even if we are not morally responsible,
and furthermore, that adopting this perspective would provide significant
benefit for our lives.
[this is simply standard determinism with an unusually positive attitude. Looks mediocre. - mh]
by Timothy O'Connor
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Hardcover (April 2000)
Oxford Univ Press; ISBN: 0195133080
refurbishes the traditional account of freedom of will as reasons-guided "agent" causation, situating its account within a general metaphysics. O'Connor's discussion of the general concept of causation and of ontological reductionism v. emergence will specially interest metaphysicians and philosophers of mind.
the metaphysical underpinnings of agent-causation, the common-sensical idea that our actions are caused by ourselves, rather than by events. He sees that agent-causation requires an analysis of event-causation in terms of the powers of things as released or inhibited by circumstances, and of agents as beings that cannot be explained by physical science. He thinks that agents may be emergent beings whose existence depends on neural structures, but these agents have got to be more than epiphenomenally supervenient states; they have got to be a new kind of being, with causal powers of its own that physical science cannot fully explain.
O'Connor is aware of modern-day alternatives to agent-causation, such as indeterminism and under-determinism. (Laura Ekstrom's recent _Free Will_ makes a good companion volume here.) He meets the common criticisms that agent causation results in an endless regress of acts of will, which he thinks rests on a misunderstanding of what agent causation is.
by Huw Price
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Paperback - (September 1997) 320 pages
Price uses the viewpoint of Archimedes, an ancient
mathematician who believed it essential to gain distance from a problem in
order to get fresh insights, to theorize on time and the interplay between
physicists, philosophers and their theories. Physics overviews blend with a
critical survey of contemporary scientists' findings to provide a lively yet
scholarly discourse.
Why is the future so different from the past? Why does the past affect the future and not the other way around? What does quantum mechanics really tell us about the world? In this important and accessible book, Huw Price throws fascinating new light these great mysteries of modern physics, and connects them in a wholly original way.
Price begins with the mystery of the arrow of time. Price shows that, for over a century, most physicists have thought about problems of time in the wrong way. Misled by the human perspective from within time, which distorts and exaggerates the differences between past and future, they have fallen victim to what Price calls the "double standard fallacy": proposed explanations of the difference between the past and the future turn out to rely on a difference which has been slipped in at the beginning, when the physicists themselves treat the past and future in different ways. To avoid this fallacy, Price argues, we need to overcome our natural tendency to think about the past and the future differently. We need to imagine a point outside time--an Archimedean "view from nowhen"--from which to observe time in an unbiased way.
Time's Arrow and Archimedes'Point presents an innovative and controversial view of time and contemporary physics. In this exciting book, Price urges physicists, philosophers, and anyone who has ever pondered the mysteries of time to look at the world from the fresh perspective of Archimedes' Point and gain a deeper understanding of ourselves, the universe around us, and our own place in time.
Why does the past affect the future? Why doesn't the future affect the past? Or, to put it another way, what does Time's Arrow only point one way? In this innovative and controversial view of time, Huw Price argues that time is not, in fact, one-directional; it is merely our perspective from within time that makes it appear so. 10 linecut illustrations.
Dave Moores wrote:
For Barbour, time, or rather the experience of change and
movement, which require time to be real, is an illusion created by the existence
of an infinity of possible simultaneously-existing and unchanging `nows'. These
nows are configurations of the complete universe in a multi-dimensional
configuration-space. Quantum-probabilistic laws govern which nows are
experienced, and all the laws of physics can be re-cast in terms of this
version of how the universe works.
After all, our experience of history is only through records and memories, which of course are part of any now we experience. After all, we don't truly look `into the past'. We simply look at records and memories available to us at this instant, and in Barbour's thesis these indeed can reflect other nows, which are other places in the universe, but not other times. The corollary of this is that nothing moves, nothing changes, in this model of the universe. We don't travel from one now to the next and experience life like watching a movie made up of multiple still snapshots. We just are. The rest is illusion.
Daniel Myers wrote:
we are captives of our position in time and that captivity
affects our observations of physical (particle, wavicle, whatever) behavior.
What the author eventually advances (after ploughing through many other
concepts and alternative explanations) is something called "advanced
action theory." There is a "common future" as well a
"common past" that influences what we call the present but that we
are unable to perceive this common future because our nature as agents
precludes us from perceiving this common future.
I thought of a spatial analogy of a person tied to the back
of the caboose of a train facing backward. He can see where the train has gone,
but not the vista ahead, which is certainly just as real. But if he has been in
this position his entire life, he would have no idea what you meant by saying
"See that mountain up ahead!" How could you know? It's as if one of
us were to state, "See that assassination attempt tomorrow!" Archimedes' Point for Mr. Price would entail
an observer standing by as the train passes observing both where it's been and
where it's going.
[yawn, big deal, any relativity student learns this view in
the first week. It's just the
4-dimensional block universe, a trivially obvious idea. -- mh]
The End of Time : The Next Revolution in Physics
by Julian B. Barbour Julian Barbour
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Hardcover - 371 pages (January 2000)
Oxford Univ Press; ISBN: 0195117298 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.23 x 9.50 x 6.35
A revolutionary new theory that attacks one of the
foundation stones of science--the existence of time
Richard Feynman once quipped: "Time is what happens
when nothing else does." But Julian Barbour disagrees: if nothing
happened, if nothing changed, time would stop. For time is nothing but change.
It is change that we perceive occurring all around us, not time. In fact, time
doesn't exist.
... Along the way, the author treats us to an enticing look
at some of the mysteries of the universe and presents intriguing ideas about
multiple worlds, time travel, immortality, and, above all, the illusion of
motion.
by David Ray Griffin
pan-experientialist physicalism grounded in the
process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Answering those who have rejected
"pan-psychism" as obviously absurd, Griffin argues compellingly that pan-experientialism,
by taking experience and spontaneity as fully natural, can finally
provide a naturalistic account of the emergence of consciousnessan account that
also does justice to the freedom that we all presuppose in practice.
[he's thinking that escaping into mind-only will give us
freedom. but mind-only is fully preset and preexistent, a block-universe
without the external world. escaping
the physical world like the gnostics is an attempt to gain impossible
metaphysical freedom for the egoic chimerical agent - mh]
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