Today I found that my 1992 Ph.D. dissertation, Free Choice and Indeterminism in Aristotle and Later Antiquity, is a free (to those with institutional access) download from UMI, so I decided to make it a free download for everybody.
Reducing and optimising the hell out of it only got it down from around 25 MB to around 18 MB, so I split it into four parts in order to get around the 5 MB maximum upload limit.
I haven’t OCR’d it because UMI has inserted renderable text on every page, which bizarrely blocks Acrobat’s OCR function, and getting around that is more hassle than it’s worth to me right now.
I still agree with what I say here in broad outlines, but not with every detail, and indeed I have a book manuscript, Aristotle on Fate and Freedom, that revises, updates, and supersedes the Aristotle portion of this. (It leaves out the sections on later antiquity.) That is better than this. But that’s not published, and this is, so here ya go.
The main thing I would want to retract today is the snarky remark about Los Angeles in the autobiographical sketch. L.A. is the bee’s knees, man! Not sure what my glitch was. (Of course it was inspired by a similar remark in Isaac Asimov’s bio, but that hardly justifies it.)
Policy of Truth 
Pingback: Aristotle on Free Will: One From the Vaults | Austro-Athenian Empire
1. What do you think about free choice? Is it the freely chosen thoughts, or the acts that show our free nature?
2. Everything, even our free choice, has limits. So how likely, in fact, would the limitations claim a choice to be ‘free’?
LikeLike
I say a bit more about free will here:
Click to access TulaneFreewill5.pdf
LikeLike
YOU’VE GOT ME BEAT! 488 PAGES!!! Mine was 479. 🙂
(bowing)
LikeLike
But have we compared font sizes, margin sizes, etc?
LikeLike
On a somewhat related topic, I’ve finally gotten around to reading your paper on why virtues are not reducible to dispositions. Having just re-read NE I-IV, I think I’m pre-disposed to agree with you.
LikeLike
Can you (or someone) share a link to said paper?
LikeLike
I can in the sense that I have the capacity. But right now, I’m upside down and on my phone so it’s uncommonly difficult. Stand by.
LikeLike
Click to access character-dispo.pdf
LikeLike
I don’t think the link is visible on a phone, only on a computer.
LikeLike
Related: http://praxeology.net/Temptation-and-Easy-Virtue-pdf.pdf
LikeLike
Prof. Long, I just ordered your dissertation in soft cover. I do much better with hard copy. You’ll be pleased to know that they now offer only black covers—no more blue covers—for these books.
LikeLike
Soft cover = hard copy … I’m so confused ….
LikeLiked by 1 person