LISTEN. The World Series may be over, but "radical evil gets its innings" still (wrote William James in the "Sick Soul" chapter of Varieties of Religious Experience). That's what's really at stake in the free will-determinism debate: whether we'll get ours, and have a shot at amelioration.
William's philosophy was, among other things, the working-out of a strategy to prolong the game and not surrender to fated failure. Determinism as he understood it is the functional equivalent of a rainout that cancels the game and gives the win to the evil visitors. The home team doesn't even get another chance to score and maybe walk off with winged victory.
And, William's philosophy was a quest for real success in living, not the squalid, fake, morally-flabby cash-value form he diagnosed as our national disease in a 1906 letter to H.G.Wells ("the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success is our national disease")... (continues)
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