As I understand it, hard determinism by definition holds that because determinism is true, no one is morally responsible for his/her actions. That is, hard determinists are simply incompatibilists who accept determinism. See the definition of 'hard determinism' given at this link . According to that definition, hard determinists hold that human agents never bear moral responsibility for their actions. By 'hard determinist', did you perhaps mean to refer to a compatibilist who accepts determinism, or perhaps just anyone who accepts determinism? I'd be interested to know which arguments persuade you that compatibilism is evasive or incoherent. I haven't found any that persuade me of that. You say that compatibilism 'is attractive because it finds room for human freedom in a deterministic world'. I find it attractive because it concentrates on the ingredients that actually seem to bear on an agent's moral responsibility, discovering thereby that indeterminism isn't one of those ingredients.

Although it is, as you say, "generally thought that all life descended from one original single-celled [organism]," the issue doesn't seem settled among the experts, as reported here . But regardless of the resolution of that issue, I'd answer no to your question. Each of the numbers you mentioned is unique. Any card in an ordinary deck is as unlikely to be drawn as any other; it's just that we arbitrarily assign special significance to particular cards, such as the ace of spades. Similarly, we may assign special significance to the number 1 or (simply because we use a base-10 system) the number 1 million, despite the fact that every number is unique. Furthermore, it's not clearly true that "all the life which exists in all the known universe seems to have arisen from one ancestor." More accurately, it's "all the life we know of seems to have arisen from one ancestor." The life we know of may constitute a small sample of all the life that exists, as yet unknown to us, in the known universe:...

Let's be careful about wording. You say that (1) time doesn't exist. You also say that (2) time is a concept that was invented by humans. If time is a concept, then I don't know which concept it could be except the concept of time . But if time is the concept of time, then each of them is the concept of a concept of a concept (and so on without end), which is an unintelligible regress. Even if time isn't the concept of time , your assertions (1) and (2) are inconsistent with each other. If time is a concept that we succeeded in inventing, then our invention must exist (or have existed), in which case (1) is false. You asked for a refutation of the statement that time is not real but merely a concept. Unless concepts aren't real, there's your refutation. So I take it that you mean, instead, that (3) the concept of time is an unfulfilled concept, like the concept of a unicorn: nothing answers to the concept, even if the concept itself exists. In that case, I haven't answered the question...

You're right: many questioners have asked about free will, moral responsibility, and their consistency with a scientific view -- determinism -- that sees the world as governed by deterministic natural laws. These topics are important philosophically and have serious practical implications. A minority of the philosophers who specialize in these topics (see this link ) say that deterministic natural laws would rule out free will and moral responsibility: they're incompatibilists . Some of those incompatibilists also accept determinism -- they're hard determinists -- and therefore they say that no one ever acts freely and no one is ever morally responsible. According to hard determinists, President Obama is no more responsible, morally -- and is no more blameworthy -- for any of his most carefully planned decisions than is an addict who assaults someone while whacked-out on PCP. They say that determinism by itself rules out moral responsibility and blameworthiness, regardless of...

I can't help you with the Greek texts. But I'd encourage you to indulge in the heresy of questioning 'the fundamental equality of human kind'. What does it mean? That every member of Homo sapiens inherently possesses the same worth, the same dignity, the same value, or the same natural rights simply in virtue of belonging our species? I don't think that claim stands up to scrutiny. Species membership, as such, can't have moral significance. Nor does the claim look more plausible if we assume that God made every member of our species 'in his own image'.

Philosophers continue to debate the relationship of mathematics to the physical world, including why mathematics is so effective at describing the physical world. The SEP entry on "Explanation in Mathematics," available at this link , contains much useful discussion as well as many references to further reading. At least one of the articles cited in the bibliography is available online: The Miracle of Applied Mathematics , by Mark Colyvan. I hope these prove helpful. Strictly speaking, the proposition that 2 + 2 = 4 can't mean the same thing as the process of taking two objects, placing two more objects alongside them, and then counting that there are four objects in total. Propositions and processes belong to different categories. Moreover, one might doubt that the proposition that 2 + 2 = 4 even entails that whenever you take two physical objects and place two more physical objects alongside them, there will be four physical objects to count up. Why?...

I agree with Prof. Leaman that philosophy hasn't cornered the market on good reasoning about difficult issues. But I'd caution anyone against thinking that even the best law schools, for example, generally attain the level of conceptual precision and logical rigor demanded by serious training in philosophy. I've been a student in law school and in a philosophy graduate program, and I think that Brian Leiter, a professor of both philosophy and law, has it right when he remarks as follows in his Philosophical Gourmet Report : "Unfortunately, a great deal of what passes for 'philosophy' in law schools -- even at some excellent law schools -- is sophomoric. Students thinking of getting a legal education, but who want to keep their philosophical interests alive (or perhaps even pursue a career in legal academia), must pick their schools carefully.... Students should bear in mind that intellectual standards in law schools are not the same as in philosophy departments. A good deal of work at many top law...

If the probability of death is 100%, and the probability of being alive tomorrow is uncertain, does that mean the probability of dying tomorrow is greater than the probability of being alive? No. Let death be represented by a fair coin's landing heads-up. The probability that the coin will land heads-up at least once in the next thousand tosses is essentially 1 out of 1 (it differs from 1 only beyond the 300th decimal place). It's also uncertain that the next toss will land tails-up. Yet those facts don't imply that the probability of heads on the next toss is greater than the probability of tails: it's a fair coin, we're assuming. Or imagine a lottery with one thousand tickets, exactly one of which is the winning ticket. You have all the tickets gathered in front of you but don't know the winning ticket. There's a 100% chance that the winning ticket is gathered in front of you but only a 0.1% chance that the next ticket you touch is the winner. Nevertheless, responsible people do plan for...

Like you, I don't see why rational decision theory must assume that agents have libertarian freedom. Indeed, if memory serves (it's been a while), Richmond Campbell argues that fundamental principles of rational decision theory rule out libertarian freedom on the part of the agent: 'Moral Justification and Freedom', Journal of Philosophy 85 (1988): 192-213. I think you're right to emphasize that if there's a deterministic causal chain leading to an agent's choice, that chain can, and typically will, include the agent's rational deliberation about which choice to make.

I'm inclined to think that there are, and perhaps must be, things that humans can't understand because of the limitations of our brains. Now, the term 'understand' might mean (i) 'understand at all (i.e., at least partly)' or (ii) 'understand completely'. On interpretation (ii), it's pretty clear that there are things we can't understand, because our finite brains can't grasp all of the infinitely many facts there are about even as ordinary a thing as my car. What's my car's exact mass right now? (No rounding allowed!) Even on interpretation (i), there may be things that humans can't understand. The only organ with which we can hope to understand something is our brain. Why wouldn't our brain's finite capacity for information storage, calculation, and so on, be accompanied by a finite capacity for understanding things? Indeed, Colin McGinn has conjectured that some of the central problems of philosophy have endured for so long because, although they have solutions, our species lacks the ability...