ABSTRACT
Determinism, although widely espoused especially in the guise of a compatibilism, hardly sports a healthy logical shape. Its more robust forms depend upon vulnerable, speculative reductionisms, based on classical physics, together with a heavy psycho-physicalism. All of these, where they have not already foundered, are really in deep trouble. Most obviously, classical physics has been superseded at the micro-level by a quantum physics which flaunts a sort of indeterminism.210 It reflects something about the respect for rationality maintained within the philosophy profession that determinism continues to be the inertial position, with free-will seen as struggling hopelessly for its life. (But it had better stay alive, not just for matters of proper responsibility and just punishment, but, just, for all those interminable introductory philosophy courses.)
14.1 A main argument flawed
In fact, however, arguments to determinism have been in bad shape logically all along, before newer physics made their debuts and damaging impacts. Until recently the arguments involved were never exposed in sufficient detail. Rather, like religious dogma, sketchy handwaving expositions were simply handed down from above from generation to generation as philosophical
gospel. Such shoddy presentation persists, both in popular philosophy and professionally. In both it is imagined that determinism somehow fans out, through laws of nature, from a past, assumed given and fixed, to the present, which is thereby determined.
