We wrap up our discussion of John Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" and begin our discussion of David Hume's "Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding."
Karl Marx said that the hellenistic philosophy is the most important part of ancient philosophy. Which raises an important point: modern philosophy, at least the major part of it, is born out of these "rejected" philosophies, specially the Epicureanism, where there's the material world and atoms and individuals and pleasure and pain... It seems to me way closer to me right now than "we have invisible Forms that are immutable and we don't have access to them but we also kinda do and there's heaven somewhere up and beyond etc etc etc"
I find Locke's account of Free Will unsatisfying. I think it generalizes human actions too much (easiest way I can put my thought of this into words), for what necessarily caused myself to want to talk this long lost friend? If we take cause and effect to be a force in nature, we must necessarily assume that our decisions and actions go through mental/bodily functions that cause us to make said actions/decisions, even if we are unaware of it. Also, just curious to know, but has there ever been a philosopher that's argued that language restricts human intelligence and its potentiality?
You wouldn't be alone in finding it unsatisfying. But I think an approach like Locke's might be the most satisfying account of "freedom" and "choice" that we can have. It's worth noting here that there are at least three positions on the problem that is generally referred to as "free will." One can be a "hard determinist" and insist that there are no free choices due to all so-called choices being caused by external natural events and laws, one can be a "libertarian" and insist that the causes of choices are a metaphysically distinct kind of cause than the deterministic cause and effect of natural laws and such choices genuinely exist (though are perhaps very rare), or one can be a "compatibilist" and hold that our "choices" being causally determined by things outside of our control doesn't stop them from being "choices" in ways that do the kind of work we want the concept of "free choice" to do. Locke's approach is a "compatibilist" approach, and if you were hoping for a "libertarian" account of free will from him, you're not going to get it, and might come away unsatisfied. If you're looking for a more mature and well-developed version of this "compatibilist" approach, you might check out Harry Frankfurt's "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person" (along with several other essays that can be found in his collection of essays titled *The Importance of What We Care About*). As for philosophers who talk about the ways in which language creates the possibility for and structural limits of thought, there are lots, especially in the 20th century. In linguistics, this is usually referred to as the "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis." Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Nelson Goodman are some 20th c. philosophers who come readily to mind who argue for some version of this idea.
@@adamrosenfeld9384 I do kind of like to think of the question through mathematical logic, in that nothing comes from nothing, and we can't just say interaction+interaction= a choice of free will, as it would basically be saying human interactions of the mind lead to a random spurring of free action, which doesn't seem to make sense. For the most part I would say I am a hard determinist, although I'm not sure if one can completely come to a conclusion of how the mind and free will works, as even though humans for the most part experience cause and effect in nature, I'm not sure we could say that we know how the material in our minds function and work for sure.
