ellauri079.html on line 303: Surprisingly, I use as an example of a free agent here a pingpong player. Presumably because my tennis-playing son has proved unsatisfactory. What I end up saying is distinguish agent causation from event causation. Futile squirming, it does not change anything.
ellauri096.html on line 136: Foundationalists reject (1). They take some propositions to be self-evident. Coherentists reject (2). They tolerate some forms of circular reasoning. For instance, Nelson Goodman (1965) has characterized the method of reflective equilibrium as virtuously circular. Charles Peirce (1933–35, 5.250) rejected (3), an approach later refined by Peter Klein (2007) and championed at book-length by Scott F. Aikin (2011). Infinitists believe that infinitely long chains of justification are no more impossible than infinitely long chains of causation. Finally, the epistemological anarchist rejects (4). As Paul Feyerabend refrains in Against Method, “Anything goes” (1988, vii, 5, 14, 19, 159).
ellauri100.html on line 479: Scientific causation: the belief that people’s actions are fully explained by a combination of biological and environmental forces
ellauri151.html on line 680: Munz (2000) discusses Wittgenstein’s reply to Frazer at length. Frazer argues that magic is based on loose associations that lead to erroneous views on causation. According to Munz, Wittgenstein holds that the distinction between beliefs and practices cannot be made, as language is at its core mythological.
xxx/ellauri174.html on line 63: Malebranche was giving in to laws of cause an effect by placing a greater emphasis than he had previously done on his occasionalist account of causation, and particularly on his contention that God acted for the most part through "general volitions" and only rarely, as in the case of miracles, through "particular volitions". A bitter dispute ensued between Malebranche and his fellow Cartesian, Arnauld, whose name I remember from Chomsky's airy forays to Port-Royal grammar in the 60's. Over the next few years, the two men wrote enough polemics against one another to fill four volumes of Malebranche's collected works and three of Arnauld's. Arnauld's supporters managed to persuade the Roman Catholic Church to place Nature and Grace on its Index of Prohibited Books in 1690, and it was followed there by the Search nineteen years later in 1709. (Ironically, the Index already contained several works by the Jansenist Arnauld himself.) Somebody blamed Malebranche for being a Spinozan, which Nick himself vehemently demented. 1715 - Malebranche dies.
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