4/22/2021 0 Comments Indeterminate Universe Rar
Its only constraint on our choice is that it have the form of a law.The Stoic response is typically to restrict each portion of the puzzle to different realms.Not all Stoics agree on how this division should be maintained.
The ancient Stoics maintained that there is one world governed by two principles: matter and reason. Modern Stoics 1 divide the world into two along those same lines. I shall be concerned here with how the modern Stoic understands each individually and how they relate. It is ordered by the categories, which permit the theoretical understanding of material events by situating each within a causal series. But in the world of matter, human action is not caused by some intention or will. As the Stoic makes clear, the will is a practical postulate which does not bear on the theoretical understanding of the world of matter: the postulates play no theoretical or explanatory role whatsoever. They provide us with concepts that define the intelligible world, but we have no intuitions to which we may apply those concepts, and consequently no theoretical knowledge of their objects. Moral responsibility has its source therefore in the world of reason, the intelligible world, not the material. ![]() It follows from this feature that we must regard our decisions as springing ultimately from principles that we have chosen, and justifiable by those principles. We must regard ourselves as having free will. The world of reason, on this view, is populated by those practical postulates needed to completely determine deliberation and moral action. This is what deliberates and ultimately chooses some course of action. It is a rational causality that is effective without being determined by an alien cause. The will is self-determining, and so is subject to no cause. It follows that moral action qua moral is undetermined by any element of the phenomenal world. For the Stoic, the will is free only insofar as it is causally isolated from the world of matter. It is nevertheless bound to law because it is itself a causality. This follows immediately from the Stoics nomological account of causation: Since the concept of a causality entails that of laws... Of course, the account of causation that applies here is relevantly distinct from that of the world of matter. The will is not bound to antecedent cause, but its deliberation is nevertheless constrained in the same sort of way. The law still applies to the will, but here the law is rational, not material: The free will therefore must have its own law... Since the will is practical reason, it cannot be conceived as acting and choosing for no reason. ![]() For the Stoic, An incentive is something that makes an action interesting to you, that makes it a live option... It does not yet provide reasons for the spontaneous will, but determines what the options arewhich things, so to speak, are candidates for reasons. ![]() But since incentives dont just disappear, this process of adopting an incentive as a maxim rather consists in the rational ordering of our incentives, of choosing which incentives take precedence over others. As the Stoic puts it, At the standpoint of spontaneity, the will must... All that it has to be is a law. This content must be compatible with the spontaneity of the will and must be available in the world of reason. For the Stoic, there is only one thing which meets these criteria: the will itself. The Stoic represents this by the following principle: act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law. They call this the Formula of Universal Law, which they say merely tells us to choose a law.
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