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xvii The very reason for being of many a philosopher's work is generally to take issue with what a predecessor has said and to disagree with it.
[JLJ - I disagree... :) But in fact are all not all philosophers like the story of the wise men and the elephant, who - in perceiving small but different parts of a larger truth - are in fact being deceived in different ways? When I disagree with Rescher it is in fact me saying that - as I see it now from my experience and point of view - that it appears to be this way to me. Ask me again, perhaps years later, and I will have a different opinion. I often disagree with my earlier self.]
xix A striking feature of the topic [free will] is its inherent contentiousness.
xx in the end one has to make up one's own mind.
p.2 Will in the philosophically relevant sense is the capacity or power of making deliberate choices regarding one's actions, and thereby guiding one's actions by means of thought... Accordingly, willing is the use of thought to resolve issues of action directed at bringing one thing or another about... On the basis of this idea, will came to be understood as the capacity of an intelligent agent to choose and decide by way of making a determination pro or con, yea or nay, for or against some way of action. Its work is to effect a determination one way or the other to intervene deliberately in the course of events with a view to bringing about a projectively imagined result... The control of outcome through the thought of an agent on the basis of reasons geared to one's own aims and preferences is the core idea of free will.
p.38 The crux of free agency is the factor of autonomous determination by an agent's thought in the absence of any undue agent-external control.
p.39 When can it be said that an agent's motivation is that agent's own rather than something imposed from without? ...An ideally free action, then, is one that issues from a well deliberated decision arrived at on the basis of the agent's autonomously developed motives.
p.121 An agent need not and indeed cannot choose his own motives for choice or decision: motives themselves lie outside an agent's option-agenda.
p.122 For along with many others, James was drawn to the idea that the will is not really free when the determinative motivators of its resolutions are not themselves freely chosen by the agent at issue.
p.122 Robert Kane proposes to see freedom as not just a matter of people's doing what they will or want, but of having "the ultimate say about what it is they want or will." Gilbert Ryle's Concept of Mind pressed the question "Are voluntary volitions themselves made voluntarily?"
p.125 Our motivation is an expression of what we are, not of what we might want to be.
p.129 throw up on your shoes, say
[JLJ - Rescher sometimes chooses bad examples and this is one of them. I would even prefer to have a reference here to the infamous 'cat on the mat'.]
p.132 I could have acted differently - if I had decided to do so.
[JLJ - I could have made a non-sarcastic comment - if I had decided to do so. I did not. Does free will hinge, then, on exercisable options?]
p.133 Free will pivots on the question of whether the agent can resolve his choices and decisions on his own terms - whether he himself controls the outcome by his autonomously unfettered deliberations... To be sure, the motives astir in an agent may well not be things about which he is pleased and proud. But pleased or not, when the agent does overtly implement his motives and bring them to expression in action, he is acting freely. One is not passively victimized by one'[s] motives; on the contrary, acting them out is a form of self-realization.
p.139 our responsibility for those motives is there not because we create them but because in accepting we endorse them... Full responsibility requires not only having those motives but approving them. Approval of one's motivation is thus seen [as] the crux of free agency... A person is free when his own motives govern his decisions and choices
p.155 We decide upon our choices, not upon our motivations. And yet those motivations are necessarily yours - an integral part of your very being.
p.156 Reasons and motives are not constraints: they impel but do not compel... An agent's values and motives are not forces by which he is passively controlled but instrumentalities through which he exercises active control.
p.164 The crucial thing about a free decision is that it be determined not FOR the agent but BY him, and that this determinism proceeds from the agent's motives and beliefs... Moreover, those motives and beliefs themselves must be autonomously formed (i.e., not imposed upon the agent by externally manipulated undue influence). Then too, the outcome of that decision must not be a foregone conclusion at some earlier stage that precludes the prospect of a "change of mind" on the agent's part. Finally... free will is altogether compatible with a coordinative "determinism" of sorts, namely one in which the agent himself is the crucial inaugurating factor.
[JLJ - Yes, but you really cannot separate an agent from the current predicament that he/she is currently in. One decides as part of a complex process that contains a reduction of the predicament to basic principles, a scheme for going on, motives, predictions of other agent's behaviors, margin, risk, time limits, other external pressures imagined or real, etc. "Free will" is a kind of academic concept, that broken down, cannot really be looked at in isolation. Outside of the ivory tower, "free will" becomes a simple but practical, 'what do I do now?' that we ask ourselves every day, out of a need to 'go on.' "Free will" will eventually bump up against some kind of constraint, somewhere. Better to think in terms of schemes to go on, plans, dreams, hopes, and the like. Better to put "free will" in the unread academic Journals on the dusty library shelves, where it belongs.]
p.169 The mind not only processes information, it processes affectivity as well, seeing that we have pro or con reactions to many acknowledged facts.
p.170 only a mind can operate the symbolic process that transforms stimuli into meanings.
[JLJ - Yet there is artificial intelligence, of which Rescher has written little. A cleverly programmed machine can accomplish as much, yet arguably has no mind.]
p.183 free will is not an observable phenomenon.
[JLJ - ...which is why this argument has no end. I freely choose to speak no more of it.]
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