Dartmouth Events

Abstract:  Many philosophers are familiar with the doctrine of the "open future" -- the doctrine, roughly speaking, that claims about undetermined aspects of the future currently fail to be true. For instance: it is not now true that it will rain tomorrow, but it is also not now true that it will not rain tomorrow.  The future is, in this sense, "open".  The doctrine of the open future has always provoked controversy on both metaphysical and logical grounds; in particular, must the open futurist deny the classical principle of bivalence? In this talk, I aim to make progress on these difficult questions by investigating what we might say about a different sort of openness, a sort of openness that almost no one accepts: the openness of the past. By defending some controversial distinctions of "scope", I defend a picture of the open past -- and the open future -- that preserves classical logic. 

Based in Edinburgh, Scotland, Patrick Todd is a faculty member, as a Chancellor's Fellow, at the University of Edinburgh, and is secretary of the Scots Philosophical Association. He completed his Ph.D, in philosophy (December 2011) at the University of California, Riverside. He is interested in metaphysics, ethics, free will and moral responsibility, and philosophy of religion, and he is teaching in the Philosophy Department here at Dartmouth this Summer Term. You can see a video of his discussion on moral responsibility and the philosophy of religion here.

The Sapientia Lecture Series is funded by the Mark J. Byrne 1985 Fund in Philosophy.