tdh@frog.UUCP (T. Dave Hudson) (08/10/85)
My dictionaries do list two different meanings of the noun "libertarian": 1) an advocate of liberty 2) an advocate of free will (as opposed to necessity) Random House and Webster's differ on which is primary. In the decade or so that I have been interested in free will, I have never seen the word "libertarian" used in the above metaphysical sense. In the meantime, I have become aware of continual ludicrous distortions of "libertarian" in the political sense. But the responsibility for checking out whether there could have been a correct conventional meaning, requiring neither qualification nor explanation, of "libertarian" was mine. Sorry, Todd Moody. I might point out that the terms of the contest between metaphysical libertarians and necessitarians make the metaphysical libertarian nothing more than a fetish-worshipper. Free will could never come from the absence of perfect physical causality. David Hudson