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 »
A common trope in discussions of fatalism is that arguments for fatalism are invariably guilty of a “modal fallacy”, specifically the fallacy of conflating “necessarily, if p then q” with “if p, then necessarily q“. In fancy academic jargon this is known as conflating the necessity of the consequence (i.e., of the whole conditional, if p then q)… Read More »
My wife and I were recently charged (indirectly and by email) by a well-meaning Christian brother with being part of an heretical, non-Christian cult. In this post I’m going to rebut the “cult” and “heresy” charges, respectively. Along the way, I’ll make some observations about baptism, faith vs. works, and what counts as “salvation”. I.… Read More »
This is part 4 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, part 2 here, and part 3 here. Ch. 3 dealt with will excluded middle (WEM), the thesis that Fp ∨ F~p (i.e., that for… 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 »
In my previous post on Ch. 2 of Patrick Todd’s book The Open Future (Oxford 2021), I criticized Todd for confusing supervaluationism with the view defended by Elizabeth Barnes and Ross Cameron in two influential papers. In this post I want to look more closely at the view of Barnes and Cameron (hereafter B&C). For ease of… Read More »
At least since Alvin Plantinga’s and David Lewis’s work on modal metaphysics, philosophers have frequently appealed to the notion of counterfactual dependence to analyze concepts like causation and grounding. David Lewis also uses the concept to understand the asymmetry of time: The way the future is depends counterfactually on the way the present is. If… 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 »