“The eyes of the Lord are in every place, watching the evil and the good.” (Proverbs 15:3) This implies to me that God is omnipresent, through time and space. With that premise, what argument can be made for free will? If he can see every action we make, he knew the actions that Adam and Eve would make before their creation. Thanks, James

I've been reading about the attempts of the US and other western nations to dissuade Iran from its nuclear program. On what grounds might a country that maintains nuclear arms insist that other countries not acquire such arms themselves?

I consider myself a (metaphysical) materialist or, to use the synonymous term that is more fashionable nowadays, physicalist, and I'm familiar with the academic literature on contemporary materialism/physicalism. But in no paper or book did I find really satisfying, fully adequate definitions of the central concepts of a material/physical object and of a material/physical property. (A material/physical property certainly isn't material/physical in the same sense as a material/physical object.) Does this mean that there actually aren't any such definitions, and that materialism/physicalism is therefore a virtually vacuous doctrine? Material/physical objects (substances) could be defined in terms of material/physical properties: x is a material/physical object =def x has some (intrinsic) material/physical properties. But then the big problem is how to properly define the concept of a material/physical property. I've been trying to devise and formulate a fully adequate definition of it for several years...

Everything can be determined. Therefore, the world is deterministic. What do you think? (1) Everything can be determined. (2) Determinism is the thesis that everything can be determined. __________________________________________________________ Therefore, (3) the world is deterministic. For example, suppose I am raking the leaves outside my house. Then the fact that I am raking the leaves can be determined. It can be determined by anybody driving past my house. It can be determined by a high resolution satellite (on a clear day with no overhanging trees). It can be determined by merely witnessing me raking the leaves. The same goes for anything else that happens. Its occurrence can be determined. For (1) not to be true would be to undermine the assumption used in court trials. All court trials assume that the occurrence of anything, crimes included, can always be determined (even if not by the available evidence). For (2) not to be true would be to say that there are things that cannot be...

I have been reading some of the work done in the analysis of knowledge for an epistemology course. Stepping outside the debates being had as to what the definition of knowledge is I find myself questioning the idea of the analysis of knowledge in general. Most arguments I have read seem to be focused on giving conditions of knowledge that describe cases in which we intuitively think that a person knows something. But what is the validity of appealing to such an intuitive notion of knowledge for the basis of analysis? Aren't our intuitions about knowledge too idiosyncratic and inconsistent to ever give a precise analysis of what knowledge is? Is the analysis of knowledge really a philosophically interesting industry?

Is it possible to think irrationally? My instincts tell me not but my philosophically-versed friends tell me that it is.

why is it that an exact replica of art is valued less than the original even though the aesthetic aspects are still the same?

Does the Turing test, the attempt to verify the proposition "Machines can think" through an 'imitation game', come down to a confusion over "like" and "identical with"? i.e can I say the following "If it is like x is thinking, therefore what x is doing is identical to thinking"?

Are there any ethical considerations when it comes to helping or harming representations of human beings, such as lifelike dolls, video game characters, images, or humanoid robots? Does one have a duty to help a video game character in need? Should one refrain from punching lifelike dolls for fun?

Is the obligation to behave ethically itself an ethical obligation? If not, what kind of obligation is it? It certainly doesn't seem logically necessary to behave ethically, since people do it all the time without becoming entwined in reality-shattering logical paradoxes, (although perhaps one could argue that people behaving unethically are, in a sense, schizophrenic...), and it isn't an explicit legal obligation, either.