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 »
The topic of identity over time has long been a topic in philosophy. Frequently, these discussions take it for granted that, for understanding the persistence of persons at least, we need to have numerical identity over time. One motivating idea is that we commonly say, in reference to photos or memories of our younger selves,… 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 »
In my previous post, I discussed the grounding objection to Molinism and also briefly touched on another problem having to with divine aseity. In this post I want to try to cut to heart of the matter and show as simply and directly as I can that Molinism is necessarily false because it is internally… Read More »
This is the second installment in a series of posts in which I respond to a recent 2013 paper by William Lane Craig and David Hunt (hereafter, C&H). Entitled “Perils of the Open Road,” C&H critique two papers defending open theism: a 2006 paper that I co-wrote with Greg Boyd and Tom Belt entitled “Open… Read More »
By the alethic openness of the future I mean that there is no complete, true, linear story of the future. The main motivation for believing that the future is alethically open comes from future contingency. If the future is not alethically open but alethically settled, then there is a complete, true, linear story of the future. But,… Read More »