Monday, April 21, 2008

Reflection

Sorry for taking so long to get these up folks, I don't know what my problem is.

There was a point in class before the break where we had established a lack of individual culpability for actions of this nature. There instead seemed to be an agreed upon satisfaction with the idea that what we and todorov could do was analyze and blame the conditions and mentality created by society. And while I essentially propose that society may be the cause for many Macro events in my post the Jeans of Society , I do not beleive that this can eliminate the ultimate culpability of the individual. I find myself in a bad episode of Voyager about temporal loops because of the various deterministic paradoxes. I believe, however, that if we take Columbus, for example, that we have no evidence to suggest he acted in the way he did because society set him up to act that way, instead, his actions and comments are entirely his own, for this reason his actions can be evaluated on their own merit without assuming a societal determinism. We could make the argument that it would have happened eventually, but it was entirely on Columbus' shoulders that it played out in that exact manner and involving him. Without this I think would could run the table to arguing that everything is societally pre-determined (although I am a physical or perhaps quantum determinism myself). I will contend, at the very least, that we have a sense of free will.

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