Back in 2011, I wrote a paper called “The Fivefold Openness of the Future” in which I argued that if the future is causally open (i.e., not wholly causally determined) then there are strong reasons to think that it is ontically, alethically, epistemically, and providentially open as well. In my 2024 book Open Theism I strengthened… Read More »
Linda Zagzebski, a distinguished philosopher who recently retired from the University of Oklahoma, has written a book titled Fatalism and the Logic of Time (Oxford, 2024). This book is a culmination of many years of reflection on the challenges posed by fatalistic arguments. Thirty-five years previously she wrote a well-received book titled The Dilemma of… Read More »
This is part seven of eleven in a series responding to the essays in Ben Arbour’s edited volume, Philosophical Essays against Open Theism (Routledge, 2019). In this post I tackle chapter 7 by Robert B. Stewart, “On Open Theism Either God Has False Beliefs, or I Can Know Something That God Cannot” (pp. 110–118). This… Read More »
This is my third and final post on Kirk MacGregor’s book, Molinist Philosophical and Theological Ventures (2022). My first post dealt with chapters 1–3. My second post dealt with chapter 4. This post covers chapters 5–6 and part of the concluding chapter. In Chapter 5 MacGregor defends Molinism’s Biblical credentials against various open theism friendly prooftexts.… Read More »
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 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 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 »
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 »