Storrs McCall

Brian Garrett (Analysis (2012), 293–5) comments on McCall's paper (Analysis (2011), 501–6). McCall had claimed that since the truth of true empirical propositions supervenes on, and depends upon, empirical fact, what God knows and does not know also depends upon being, i.e. upon facts. Consequently God's foreknowing what I freely decide to do depends upon what I freely do. Garrett objects that the dependence of truth on being seems to play no essential role in McCall's argument. McCall replies that his argument is an up-to-date version of Luis de Molina's 16th century reconciliation of freewill with omniscience, in which the dependence of God's knowledge on what humans do is crucial

In his paper ‘‘Bad luck once again’’ Neil Levy attacks our proof of the consistency of libertarianism by reiterating a time-worn compatibilist complaint.1 This is, that what is not determined must be due to chance. If A has a choice of X or Y, neither X nor Y being causally determined, then if A chooses X it can only be by chance, never for a reason. The only ‘‘reason’’ that could explain the choice of X over Y would have to be a causally sufficient reason, which would rule out A’s having a genuine choice in the first place. Either X is causally necessitated or X is realized by sheer luck. But that these are the only alternatives is untrue. The exercise of deliberative reason opens the way between the Scylla of causal necessitation and the Charybdis of chance, as we shall try to make clear. The central core of Levy’s argument is that any attempt to give a reasons-based explanation of a contrastive fact must fail. A contrastive fact is a fact of the kind ‘‘Jane decides to vacation in Hawaii rather than Colorado,’’ or ‘‘Jane assigns a greater weight to surfing that to white-water rafting.’’ In the last three paragraphs of his paper Levy argues that Jane’s assigning more weight to surfing than to rafting cannot be a reasons-based assignment, because, as he puts it, ‘‘the reasons that would explain the weighting are the weighted reasons themselves.’’ Similarly, prior to making her Hawaii⁄ Colorado decision, Jane has..

The aim of the paper is to prove the consistency of libertarianism. We examine the example of Jane, who deliberates at length over whether to vacation in Colorado (C) or Hawaii (H), weighing the costs and benefits, consulting travel brochures, etc. Underlying phenomenological deliberation is an indeterministic neural process in which nonactual motor neural states n(C) and n(H) corresponding to alternatives C and H remain physically possible up until the moment of decision. The neurophysiological probabilities pr(n(C)) and pr(n(H)) evolve continuously according to the different weights Jane's judgement attaches to C and H at different times during the deliberation. The overall process is indeterministic, since Jane's exact judgemental weighting would vary slightly were the process to be repeated from the same initial conditions. The weighting is however rational, and entirely under Jane's control. This controlled, rational, indeterministic process shows that libertarianism is a consistent philosophical thesis

We all make decisions, sometimes dozens in the course of a day. This paper is about what is involved in this activity. It's my contention that the ability to deliberate, to weigh different courses of action, and then to decide on one of them, is a distinctively human activity, or at least an activity which sets man and the higher animals apart from other creatures. It is as much decisio as ratio that constitutes the distinguishing mark of human beings. Homo may not always be rationalis, but he is always decidens.The paper is about practical decision, although there is also another important kind of decision that I won't discuss, namely cognitive decision. The difference is roughly that which distinguishes the function of a jury from that of a judge, at least in jury trials. The jury's job is to arrive at an answer to the question: guilty or not guilty? This is a cognitive decision, a decision that, on the basis of the evidence, such-and-such is the case. The judge, apprized of the jury's cognitive decision, makes the practical decision to sentence the guilty party to 20 years. On some other occasion, I hope to be able to say something about cognitive decision, as well as about a third kind of decision named value decision.

The title of this paper may seem to involve a contradiction: my purpose is to show that it does not.Individuals fall into two categories; those which depend for their existence upon the existence of other individuals, and those which do not. In the second category are found such things as shoes, ships, cabbages, kings, and discrete bits of sealing wax. These may be calledindividual substances, and the way in which the existence of a cabbage depends upon water and earth, or in which Descartes says the existence of all things depends upon God, will not be in point here. The individuals of the first category are characterized by a much more obvious kind of dependence. They include the sound of an individual shoe falling on the floor, the sinking of theBismarck, the stupidity of George I, the centre of gravity of a bit of sealing wax. All these are individuals, though they are not individual substances. They are what I shall callabstract individuals, orabstract particulars.

The basis of a rigorous formal axiomatization of quantum mechanics is constructed, built upon Dirac's bra-ket notation. The system is three-sorted, with separate variables for scalars, vectors and operators. First-order quantification over all three types of variable is permitted. Economy in the axioms is effected by, e.g., assigning a single logical function * to transform (i) a scalar into its complex conjugate, (ii) a ket vector into a bra and a bra into a ket, (iii) an operator into its adjoint. The system is accompanied by a formal semantics. Further papers will deal with vector subspaces and projection operators, operators with continuous spectra, tensor products, observables, and quantum mechanical probabilities