Favorite thinker of the day
Penned in response to NP’s question:
Great Thinkers: Who are they? Who have they been in the past? Who had an original thought and why was it important?
David Hume (I’m a fan of most thinkers of the Enlightenment)
for various reasons, but my favorite has to do with his ideas regarding the compatibility of Determinism vs. Free Will. He argued (more eloquently than I can paraphrase his idea) that if your actions are not determined by events that happened earlier (as the result of experiences in your life which have formed your character and personal preferences), then your actions are completely random. How can someone be responsible for a random act? Hume argued that Free Will somehow then, requires Determinism because to be able to freely choose something requires a connection between preference and action. I’ve always found this an interesting proposition since at face value the two concepts of Determinism and Free Will seem mutually exclusive.
