[lit-ideas] Re: The Institution of Slavery and the Concept of Free Will
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 24 Apr 2011 15:57:41 +0100 (BST)
Unfortunately, these potted remarks by JLS are off-putting to serious
discussion as they are caged in what could easily be a series of fabricated,
'scherzo' and self-indulgent fancies.
Nor is clear how the "institution of slavery" throws much philosophical light
on the analysis of "free will", and in particular the question that "free will"
is never absolutely free or 'unconditioned'. That humans are placed sometimes
in situations where their freedom from coercion is very limited, does not
easily tell us much about situations where their freedom is not so limited.
Whatever philosophical view we take of "free will", it hardly alters anything
as regards the historical facts about the "institution of slavery" or vice
versa: for example, insofar as slaves preferred slavery to honourable suicide
it could be (and was) argued that remaining a slave was an act of "free will",
albeit of a very fractionalised or fettered kind.
William Bartley once wrote a book "Wittgenstein" that was reviewed as a
"farrago of lies and poppycock", yet it is ill-deserving of this rebuke in
comparison to some of JLS' posts. I guess if the various attributions are all
present and correct, I'll have to apologise for suggesting that this post is an
attempt at time-wasting as much as anything more worthwhile. As it written by
an educated person, it might even be used as evidence that education is largely
a waste of time.
Donal
Founder member of the MHIAC Society
Salop
--- On Sat, 23/4/11, Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx <Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx <Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx>
> Subject: [lit-ideas] The Institution of Slavery and the Concept of Free Will
> To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Date: Saturday, 23 April, 2011, 7:54
> A Half-Free Will: Oenomus's Solution
> to a Time-Honoured Philosophical
> Problem
>
> In an article of 1927, Miss T. Henry, in "Proceedings
> of the American
> Philosophical Association" -- she taught Latin at
> Brooklyn --, noted that the
> solution to Chrysippus's problem (of the free will)
> as indicated by Cicero,
> "De Fato", was solved by Oenomus.
>
> Chrysippus was saying that the will is not free.
> Oenomus disagreed. "The
> will may not be as free as you wish her to be; it is
> half-free, if you must".
>
> He just added the prefix, 'hemi-' (as in hemisphere)
> and applied it to
> 'free' (hemieleutheros) and also 'slave' (hemidoulos,
> semiservus, semiliber).
>
> The point, as Geary notes, is, whether we'll call a
> halffree man free.
> "It's like when people ask me if a half-full glass is full.
> Depends on the
> context of utterance."
>
> -------
>
> The idea of a half-free will makes a lot of sense.
>
> Philosophy cannot be understood, as Geary notes,
> "outside the context of
> utterance. The most important philosophical concepts
> are rooted in forms of
> life. In that sense, it was the institution of slavery
> that gave Lincoln
> the glorious concept of 'freedom': "We have two
> Americas: half-slave,
> half-free". He was talking before "The War."
>
> "All men are created free" makes sense as
> "implicating" that someone
> suggested that all men are created slaves.
>
> The Native Americans lacked, Geary notes, "a notion
> of 'free'; ergo, they
> lacked a notion of 'slave' -- and vice versa. But now
> they have learned."
> And so on.
>
> Etc.
>
> J. L. Speranza
>
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