I
t's kind of funny how much time I spend thinking about philosophy. I am not and never was a philosophy major, and in fact don't even have a college degree, but love of knowledge has been a sort of hobby of mine for a long, long time, and it has worn a very specific kind of groove in my mind. I have well-used and -tested thinking systems with which I occasionally occupy myself, and I think they're pretty good. In my arrogance, I think that I'm more right about a great deal of philosophy than most philosophy majors, but really that's neither here nor there. Philosophy was born as an amateur pursuit, rather than an academic profession, and I like to think I'm engaging in the traditional form of philosophy simply by trying to think my way clearly through things, and have conversations with my friends about them.
I get a lot of my thinking done while driving (which means I like to drive in utter silence, which can drive a lot of my friends and family crazy), and I don't often take the time to write things down, which means that I tend to "circle" around problems in my head, occasionally re-treading ground as I try to develop the right way to frame things that will make it clearer to me (and my imagined argumentative counterparts). It's always very gratifying when I suddenly come up with the right analogy that I feel explicates my position adequately.
For the past little while, I've been circling around the problem of free will, as it obvious from my recent posts. I'm fairly confident in my position, but the way that I get there is pretty divorced from typical modern thinking patterns on the subject. So, I need a compelling analogy to bridge the gap from my neo-aristotelian position to the semi-positivist, materialist position that most people who deny free will hold. I can tell that I'm close -- I've already clarified several parts of the issue to myself, and I think there's a good argument brewing right now, but I'm not quite there yet, and this state of semi-coherence can be a little frustrating. I guess I need to drive aroud a little bit more.