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标题：Transcendence and Mediation : From Tartaglia to the Free-Will Debate
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作者：Sho Yamaguchi
期刊名称：Journal of Philosophy of Life
电子版ISSN：2185-4505
出版年度：2017
卷号：7
期号：1
页码：279-304
出版社：Research Institute for Contemporary Philosophy of Life
摘要：Taking inspiration from James Tartaglia’s Philosophy in a Meaningless Life, I suggest a way out ofthe present dialectical stalemate in analytic philosophy of free will and moral responsibility. The keyconcept employed in my proposal is transcendence, i.e., our remarkable ability to self-relativize bystepping back from the social framework understanding which determines our systems of value.Analytic philosophers who favor one of the standard, determinate and mutually exclusive positionsin the free-will debate have marginalized this aspect of transcendence in human life. For if oneconceives human life as essentially involving the movement of transcendence, then one can discernan element of self-deception in the analytic philosophers’ self-images of themselves as defenders ofthe one true theory, as cast within a fixed framework of language and thought. One of the centralsuggestions of this essay is that analytic philosophers – including myself – should abandon such aself-image, because when we philosophize, we are always already engaged in an endless effort ofself-reflection, self-criticism and self-revision. I argue, in addition, that it is loyalty to the untenableself-image which forces the philosophical debate on free will and moral responsibility into a viciousdeadlock. As such, my essay is an attempt to philosophically investigate the topic of free willwithout succumbing to the self-image of ‘Seeker of The Unique and Definitive Truth’.