Metaphysics & the Future

The nature of time is one of the central topics in metaphysics. According to one view only the constantly advancing present is real.  On another view, the present is real but so too is the entirety of the past. On yet another view – often known as eternalism – the past, present and future are all equally real. The eternalist conception is favoured by many contemporary physicists, but it has implications many find perturbing. If the future is as set in stone as the past, are we in any sense truly free? 

Publications

Dainton, B. Time & Space, 2nd edition, Routledge, 2010

Dainton, B. “Some cosmological Implications of Temporal Experience”, Cosmological and Psychological Time, Springer, Boston Studies in Philosophy of Science, 2015

Dainton, B. “Time and Temporal Experience”, The Future of the Philosophy of Time, Routledge, 2012

Gaskin, R. The Sea Battle and the master argument: Aristotle and Diodorus Cronus on the metaphysics of the future, de Gruyter, 1995

Gaskin R. “Fatalism, Bivalence and the Past”, Philosophical Quarterly, 1998

Gaskin, R. “Middle Knowledge, fatalism and comparative similarity of worlds”, Religious Studies 34, 1998

Gaskin, Richard. “Molina on Divine Foreknowledge and the Principle of Bivalence,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 32, 1994

Hill, D. Divinity and Maximal Greatness, Routledge 2005