"July was the warmest month on record in the U.S. The average temperature for the month came in at 77.6°F overall, which was 3.3°F higher than the 20th-century average, and 0.2°F warmer than the previous hottest month on record, set in July 1936 back in the Dust Bowl era. This came at the same time as the so-called drought footprint -- the area of the country affected by drought conditions -- reached a record high, and the worst drought since at least 1956 laid waste to hopes for a bumper corn and soybean crop, spurring the Agriculture Department to issue the largest-ever disaster declaration in its history." --Climate Central.
This post is dedicated to Mark Bedau , my philosophy professor at Reed, a great guy and a wonderful teacher, by far the least pretentious philosopher I've ever met. He is responsible for this post only insofar as he sparked my interest in the subject; its many shortcomings are mine alone. Who's ready for some unqualified philosophical rambling? I'm not going to do much more than summarize, as this is probably one of the five biggest problems in philosophy and the material quickly gets out of hand. Anyway—let's start with some terms, appropriately hefty philosophical ones. (I'm going to steal shamelessly from Wikipedia, as the free will article is very good.) Free will is "purported ability of agents to make choices free from constraints." Some call it the "ability to have done otherwise," but that definition runs into problems which I'll describe later. Determinism is the view that all events are caused by previous events, while indet...
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