#strawson

"If we sufficiently, that is radically, modify the view of the optimist [compatibilist], his view is the right one. It is far from wrong to emphasize the efficacy of all those practices which express or manifest our moral attitudes, in regulating behaviour in ways considered desirable; or to add that when certain of our beliefs about the efficacy of some of these practices turns out to be false, then we may have good reason for dropping or modifying those practices. What is wrong is to forget that these practices, and their reception, the reactions to them, really are expressions of our moral attitudes and not merely devices we calculatingly employ for regulative purposes. Our practices do not merely exploit our natures, they express them. Indeed the very understanding of the kind of efficacy these expressions of our attitudes have turns on our remembering this. When we do remember this, and modify the optimist’s position accordingly, we simultaneously correct its conceptual deficiencies and ward off the dangers it seems to entail, without recourse to the obscure and panicky metaphysics of libertarianism."

"Habría que buscar la llave de la unidad de la conciencia en el hecho de que la conexión de nuestras percepciones es 'producida' por la 'actividad' de la mente. El proceso de producción de tal conexión o unidad se llama síntesis; y nuestra conciencia de la identidad de nosotros mismos no es, fundamentalmente, sino nuestra conciencia de este poder de síntesis, o combinación, y de su ejercicio. Puedo tomar como 'mía' una representación solamente porque 'yo' la he combinado o sintetizado con otras. Ahora bien, los únicos modos posibles de sintetizar intuiciones dadas para un entendimiento como el nuestro son los que están representados por las categorías; y la combinación de representaciones de acuerdo con las categorías es su combinación en juicios acerca de lo que objetivamente sucede. Por lo tanto, el hecho de que mi experiencia lo sea de un mundo objetivo unificado es una consecuencia necesaria del hecho de que sólo bajo esta condición podría yo ser consciente de todas y cada una de mis distintas experiencias como 'mis' experiencias. Y también por lo tanto, concluye Kant, somos nosotros mismos la fuente de cualquier orden y conexión generales que sean necesarios en la Naturaleza para que se satisfaga este requisito de objetividad y unidad"

In the effort to describe our experiences we are continually putting words to new uses, connected with, but not identical with, their familiar uses; applying them to states of affairs which are both like and unlike those to which the words are most familiarly applied.

Story - Part 3

Agreement among experts in the special sciences and in exact scholarship may reasonably be hoped for and gradually attained. But philosophy, which takes human thought in general as its field, is not thus conveniently confined; and truth in philosophy, though not to be despaired of, is so complex and many-sided, so multi-faced, that any individual philosopher’s work, if it is to have any unity and coherence, must at best emphasize some aspects of the truth, to the neglect of others which may strike another philosopher with greater force. Hence the appearance of endemic disagreement in the subject is something to be expected rather than deplored; and it is no matter for wonder that the individual philosopher’s views are more likely than those of the scientist or exact scholar to reflect in part his individual taste and temperament.