1 The department has a taste for preciseness and direction.
2 No doubt, but that word 'largely' covers much.
3 But there may be differences too, and important ones, between the two sorts of enquiry. It may be quite inappropriate to foister the math. logic model onto philos. logic & even less appropriate in political philosophy.
4 Is this just pious hope or what?
5 Some systems might well be.
5b But why are you so sure that there is anything beside the clothes?
6 This paragraph is the statement of a dogma, not the sustained conclusion of an argument.
7 Agreed, but then what about DA6?
8 It sounds as though you have already decided the answer.
9 Not the options. Just yours. Because you have already cut yourself off from other speakers of English. (Paradoxically you still write using what appear to be English words.)
10 Here I just do not find an intelligible sentence.
11 Fine.
12 Fine. You could then begin with this programme.
13 I doubt if anything else can or will, and it certainly is a start.
14 But can't we point that out and thus take it into account?
15 This may all be true, but we can in fact nevertheless talk about political and moral freedoms as such without raising the free will problem as such.
16 But it does matter whether the bath is hot or cold.
17 'am I free to do X' is more helpful.
18 I think it would not be difficult to construct a scale.
19 This presupposes we know what 'free' means. Your sense, or my sense, or common sense, or what sense?
20 Not as Rousseau sees it.
21 Is he barred, or is it that he just cannot? I am not barred from living to be 1000 years old, I just cannot.
22 How do we know this?
23 Why not?
24 Is their mind physiology predictable?
25 This, as you said, is not about the concept of political liberty. But it is does not tell me much about the concept of any sort of liberty either. You are working within a dichotomy which you have set up for yourself about the nature of philosophical enquiry which is I believe mistaken, but, worse, because of its nature prevents you taking off to really do any philosophy at all because you are too heavily disposed to believe that philosophy is only about abstract deductive systems, & it is not. Indeed there is something to be said for the view that such systems, necessarily, are not philosophy at all. They really are just games, though some of them have useful applications.
©
written mid 1975, edited into HTML 1997/2/22 last edited 1997/2/28