This is the 9th and final installment of my series on Patrick Todd’s recently published book The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False (Oxford, 2021). (Previous installments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.) In this chapter Todd tackles the “assertion problem” for open futurism. He’s quick to clarify that it’s not… Read More »
This is part 8 of my ongoing series on Patrick Todd’s recently published book The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False (Oxford, 2021). (Previous installments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.) In Chapter 7 Todd and his coauthor, Brian Rabern, tackle a view that they dub “open-closurism”. It’s the view espoused by… Read More »
This is part 7 of my ongoing series on Patrick Todd’s recently published book The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False (Oxford, 2021). (Previous installments: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6.) This post continues my discussion of Ch.6, focusing on pp. 129–147, which is concerned with… Read More »
This is part 6 of my ongoing series on Patrick Todd’s recently published book The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False (Oxford, 2021). (Previous installments: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5.) Chapter 6 is a long chapter that arguably should have been split into two parts—at the very… Read More »
This is part 5 of my ongoing series on Patrick Todd’s recently published book The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False (Oxford, 2021). (Previous installments: part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.) Chapter 5 is a relatively short chapter that initially focuses on how to understand divine omniscience in relation to… Read More »
This is part 3 of my ongoing series on Patrick Todd’s recently published book The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False (Oxford, 2021). You can find part 1 here and part 2 here. Todd’s main focus in chapter 3 is a thesis that he calls “will excluded middle” (WEM). Simply put, WEM says… Read More »
This is part 2 of my ongoing series on Patrick Todd’s recently published book The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False (Oxford, 2021). You can find part 1 here. In chapter 2, Todd compares and contrasts “three models of the undetermined future” and proposes a unified semantics for the future tense. I argue… Read More »
I’m slowly working my way through Patrick Todd’s recently published book The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False (Oxford, 2021). I say “slowly” because I’m juggling a few other projects at the moment and want to make sure that I give his book its proper due given the centrality of the topic to my… Read More »