Week 7 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 7 — Same Self, Free Choice: Testing the Answers — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Philosophy Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 7 of the term — credit this week's cases to their sources, state the answers to the ship of Theseus and to personal identity at their strongest, key an argument about free will for validity, weigh the three free will positions, and explain determinism to someone new to philosophy.

This week you learned numerical and qualitative identity, the ship of Theseus, Locke's memory theory, the Buddhist teaching of no-self, determinism and fatalism, hard determinism, libertarianism, and compatibilism, and Frankfurt's cases. In Week 2 you learned standard form, validity, and disjunctive syllogism, and in Week 6 you asked what a mind is. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Philosophy Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles; this assignment is where you put them together.

The task

You will use this week's pinned sources, Dataset F (the three free will positions), and Dataset B, the argument set (illustrative). Dataset B's premises are written for teaching and are not claims the course endorses; the course keys its arguments for validity only, never for soundness, because the premises are open questions. The everyday cases below were written for this assignment; they are illustrative and describe no real person or place.

Part A — get the sources right, then weigh the identity answers. A post on a study-group forum reads: "Locke's ship of Theseus proves you are the same person only if you keep the same body, and the Buddhist no-self teaching says that nobody really exists." Do three things:

Correct the post. Name the source of the ship of Theseus, and quote the course's line from it with its translator; say what Locke's memory theory points to instead of the body; and say what the teaching of no-self denies and what it does not deny, using the chariot of the Questions of King Milinda.
State both answers to the ship. State the "same ship" answer and the "new ship" answer each at its strongest, with its strongest objection and a reply from its own side, and say which sense of "same", numerical or qualitative, the puzzle is about.
Test the memory theory. State Locke's memory theory, give its strongest objection, and give the reply its defenders make.

Then work this problem, showing your reasoning:

Gettier's "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" dates from 1963, and Frankfurt's "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility" dates from 1969. How many years separate them?

Part B — key the argument, then weigh the free will positions. Work this problem first, showing your reasoning:

Frankfurt's "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility" dates from 1969, and Searle's "Minds, Brains, and Programs" dates from 1980. How many years separate them?

Then do three things:

Key argument 4. Write Dataset B's argument 4 in standard form ("Either free will is an illusion or determinism is false. Free will is not an illusion. So determinism is false."), name its form, key it for validity with a one-sentence reason from the definition of validity, and say which premise, if any, each of the three free will positions rejects.
State all three positions at their strongest. State hard determinism, libertarianism, and compatibilism each as its best defenders would, with its strongest objection and a reply from its own side.
Run a Frankfurt case. Describe a Frankfurt case of your own, labelled as a variation, name the principle it challenges, and end with one plain sentence naming exactly where hard determinism and compatibilism disagree.

Explain it to a non-expert

A roommate who has never taken philosophy says, "If determinism is true, then nothing I do makes any difference, so why bother studying for anything?" Write a 3–5 sentence message in everyday words that explains what determinism says, how it differs from the view your roommate is describing, and one honest limit of what you can claim. Explain any term your roommate might not know.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a cousin who asks whether a bike with a new chain, new tires, and a new seat is still the same bike. Model answer: "There are two senses of 'same'. Two bikes from one factory can be exactly alike and still be two bikes; that is being alike. Your bike is the other kind of same, if it is one bike that has lasted and changed. Fixing it a part at a time never made a second bike. One limit: philosophers still argue about what happens when every part is replaced, so this answer is one side of an open question."

Use that pattern for your message to your roommate, with your own explanation of determinism.

Revise and reflect

Put your first draft away for a few hours, then reread it against Chapter 7. For the correction, check the source, the quotation, and its translator word for word against the chapter; for the ship and the memory theory, ask whether each view's best defender would sign your statement of it; for argument 4, check the form's name against Week 2's list and each position's rejected premise against Dataset F; for your Frankfurt case, confirm that the person could not have done otherwise and that you labelled it as a variation; and check that your roommate message keeps determinism apart from fatalism. Make at least one change and keep both versions. Then answer one of these two options in 2–4 sentences; they carry the same weight:

(a) Which change made your sourcing or your reconstruction more exact, and which definition or pinned fact showed you it was needed?
(b) Which change made your statement of one of the positions stronger, and what had you left out at first?

Deliverables

Submit one document or recording that contains, in this order:

your Part A forum-post correction with your first year gap, your two answers to the ship, and the memory theory with its objection and reply;
your Part B year gap, argument 4 keyed with each position's rejected premise, the three free will positions with objections and replies, your Frankfurt case, and your plain sentence;
your message to your roommate;
your first and revised versions of the part you changed, and your reflection.

Choose how you show it. Present your work as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about five minutes with a transcript. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the correction, the evaluation, the reconstruction, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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