Even if determinism is incompatible with free will, a claim of hard determinism might be false or misleading. It is false if the world is in fact indeterministic. It is misleading if determinism is true, but free will would be impossible even if it weren't. That is, it may be that our ordinary concept of free will is like the concept of a round square, a concept of something that could not possibly exist. If so, it is misleading to put the blame on determinism.

As philosophers typically analyze it, knowledge requires belief, truth, and some kind of justification or reliability; but not certainy or the impossibility of doubt. Yet when I tell my wife that I know that the play starts at 8pm and she replies, 'Are you certain?', I find it difficult to reply, 'No, I'm not certain; but I know'.

Many years ago a meteorologist told me that persistence forecasting compares favourably with other, more sophisticated rules for predicting the weather. When I asked the obvious question, she told me that persistence forcasting is the rule that says that the weather tomorrow will be the same as it was today. One thing (though not the first thing) that struck me about this reply was that it does seem perfectly coherent to argue that persistence forecasting is likely to be about as reliable in the future as it was observed to be in the past, even though persistence forecasting is itself a rule that says that that the future will be like the past. If you never checked its track record, you would have no reason to trust persistence forecasting; but if you did, you would. (If you are familiar with the Humean problem of induction, this may suggest to you that it is possible to defend an inductive justification of induction after all. That's what it suggests to me.)

Death and suicide figure prominently in Plato's work, in the Crito , Phaedo, and Apology.

This is a difficult question that understandably raises strong emotions. Some animal research has yielded significant benefit to humans, in drug development and in many other areas. But these human benefits have been purchased at the cost of animal harms, and it is natural to worry whether this is fair. Some people are reassured about the morality of animal experimentation by the fact that we kill so many more animals for meat than we do for research, or by the fact that more rodents are killed by cats than by scientists. But it is not clear that we should be morally reassured by these facts. Some would argue that even though animal suffering is bad and morally significant, animal death is does not have the same moral significance as human death, because of various abilities that humans have to conceptualise and to anticipate that animals lack. So one might be able to justify killing animals in experiments, if their suffering is sufficiently low. (Similarly, one might think that it is morally...

On one view, time is a lot like another dimension lying alonside the three dimensions of space. On this view time doesn't move: all times are equally real at all times, just as all parts of space are equally real from all places. But do we move along time? Well, we are in different places at different times, and of course we are at different times at different times. According to another view of time, the present is privileged. As George Santayana once said, 'the present is like the fire running along the fuse of time'. On this view, it looks like we are moving along time, and so is the present.

It helps to begin by distinguishing laws of nature from our hypotheses about them. Then the first question is whether there really are laws of nature out there. I'm one of those philosophers who believes there are, though just what it takes to be a law is hard to say. For example, is a law just an objective pattern of properties, or does a law have a special kind of necessity? But some philosophers would deny that even the patterns are fully out there, because they hold that the structure of properties is something scientists impose on the world: the world does not come pre-carved into natural kinds. So the answer to your question is a little complicated. Even if the laws depend on our own scheme of classification, it would probably be misleading to say we invent them: it is not as if we can just make them any way we like. And even if the laws of nature are fully objective and out there independently of us, it is still up to us to think up the hypotheses that are supposed to describe them. In any...

Scientific theories cannot be proven or disproven. For one thing, some of the data on which the proof or disproof is supposed to be based may itself be incorrect. (Francis Crick, of double-helix fame, supposedly said that if you theory fits all your data then you know its false, because you know that some of your data is false.) But even if all your data are true, scientific theories go beyond those data (that's their point) and so cannot be proven from them. And theories can not in general be disproven by data either. Although a theory may be used to make a prediction that is then found to be false, the prediction almost never followed from the theory alone, but only from the theory along with various additional assumptions (the instruments are working properly, there are no disturbing forces acting on the experiment, etc.), so when the prediction fails, you do not know for sure whether to blame the theory or one of the other assumptions. Nevetheless, there is something to the idea that...

Even if beauty itself is is not in the eye of the beholder, the appearance of beauty is. But we don't always decide what we think. For example, you can't come to believe something just because I ask you to, even if you want to please me. Similarly, you can't decide what you will like and what you will hate. And the same goes for the appearance of beauty. If something appears ugly to you, you can't just decide to make it appear beautiful, even if you know you would be happier if you could. Some parts of our mental life are under our direct and conscious control; but lots of them are not.

There is a story about someone who came up to a well-known moral philosopher in a restaurant and asked him what he thought about the arguments for vegetarianism. "I've actually thought quite a bit about some of those arguments, and I'm half-convinced by them", he replied. "So I don't eat meat for lunch."