Rem B. Edwards

This article defends Marjorie Suchocki’s position against two main objections raised by David E. Conner. Conner objects that God as a single actual entity must be temporal because there is succession in God’s experience ofthe world. The reply is that time involves at least two successive occasions separated by perishing, but in God nothing ever perishes. Conner also objects that Suchocki’s personalistic process theism is not experiential but is instead theoretical and not definitive. The reply is that his dismissal of Part V of PR is arbitrary, the interpretation of all experience is theoretical, and no metaphysical interpretations are absolutely definitive, including PR as a whole. Also, Conner ignores religious experience.

A typical dispute between a libertarian and a determinist will usually involve some reference to ‘self-determination’. The libertarian will perhaps claim that I am free when I am not determined in my choices by anything outside myself but instead determine my choices ‘myself’. To this the determinist is likely to reply that ‘self-determination’ is determination all the same and that he cannot see how the freedom of choice defended by the libertarian is an exception to determinism. This is where the discussion usually ends in frustration. The belief may persist that something is being disputed, but no one is very sure what that thing is. From the frequency that the term ‘self-determination’ appears in discussions of freedom, it might be gathered that the notion is one of primary importance. Unfortunately, in spite of its centrality, the meaning of the term is often left extremely vague. Nevertheless, underlying every appearance of the term is a special theory of some kind about the nature of the self, and where there is no such theory the term is probably used without any meaning at all.