Timelessness and freedom
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Timelessness and freedom Taylor W. Cyr1 Received: 4 June 2018 / Accepted: 31 August 2018 © Springer Nature B.V. 2018
Abstract One way that philosophers have attempted to defend free will against the threat of fatalism and against the threat from divine beliefs has been to endorse timelessness views (about propositions and God’s beliefs, respectively). In this paper, I argue that, in order to respond to general worries about fatalism and divine beliefs, timelessness views must appeal to the notion of dependence. Once they do this, however, their distinctive position as timelessness views becomes otiose, for the appeal to dependence, if it helps at all, would itself be sufficient to block worries about fatalism and divine beliefs. I conclude by discussing some implications for dialectical progress. Keywords Dependence · Divine beliefs · Fatalism · Propositions · Timelessness
1 Introduction Consider the following fatalistic argument: (1) You had no choice about: it was true 1000 years ago that you would read this paper at t. (2) Necessarily, if it was true 1000 years ago that you would read this paper at t, then you read this paper at t. (3) Therefore, you had no choice about: reading this paper at t.1 1 For a discussion of similar arguments, see the introduction to Fischer and Todd (2015). The first premise
and the conclusion of this argument include what we might call a “no choice operator” (cf. van Inwagen 1983), which may be read as claiming that a certain fact obtains (e.g., in the conclusion, the fact of your reading this paper at t) and that you had no choice about that fact’s obtaining. The conclusion of the argument concerns the freedom to do otherwise; not having a choice about the fact that you perform some action X is roughly equivalent to not being able to do otherwise than X. (As should be clear, there is nothing special about the times and action in question, so the argument generalizes to the fatalistic conclusion that we never have a choice about anything we do.) Arguments like this one rely on a “transfer principle” that allow us to infer (3) from (1) and (2): “you have no choice about what necessarily follows from what you have no choice about” (Todd and Fischer 2015: p. 3). I will not evaluate this principle here.
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Taylor W. Cyr [email protected] Department of Philosophy, Washington University in St. Louis, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA
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Synthese
Some philosophers deny that propositions are true at times, so they respond to arguments like this one by denying that anything “was true 1000 years ago”—and thus, they think, premise (1) is either meaningless or—if a meaningful sense can be given to “was true 1000 years ago”—implausible. Now consider a structurally parallel argument about divine beliefs: (1*) You had no choice about: God believed 1000 years ago that you would read this paper at t.2 (2*) Necessarily, if God believed 1000 years ago that you would read this paper at t, then you read this paper at t. (3) Therefore, you had no choice about: reading this pape
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