There is a long-standing disagreement among Branching-Time theorists. Even though they all believe that the branching representation accurately grasps the idea that the future, contrary to the past, is open, they argue whether this representation is compatible with the claim that one among many possible futures is distinguished—the single future that will come to be. This disagreement is paralleled in an argument about the bivalence of future contingents. The single, privileged future is often called the Thin Red Line. I reconstruct (...) the history of the arguments for and against this idea. Then, I propose my own version of the Thin Red Line theory which is immune to the major objections found in the literature. I argue that the semantic disagreement is grounded in distinct metaphysical presuppositions. My solution is expressed in a conceptual framework proposed by John MacFarlane, who distinguishes semantics from postsemantics. I extend his distinction and introduce a new notion of presemantics to elucidate my idea. (shrink)

In a recently published paper, Patrick Todd (2016, 'Future contingents are all false! On behalf of a Russellian open future') advocates a novel treatment of future contingents. On his view, all statements concerning the contingent future are false. He motivates his semantic postulates by considerations in philosophy of time and modality, in particular by the claim that there is no actual future. I present a number of highly controversial consequences of Todd’s theory. Inadequacy of his semantics might indirectly serve as (...) an argument against the philosophical view underpinning his proposal. (shrink)

The thin red line ( TRL ) is a theory about the semantics of future-contingents. The central idea is that there is such a thing as the ‘actual future’, even in the presence of indeterminism. It is inspired by a famous solution to the problem of divine foreknowledge associated with William of Ockham, in which the freedom of agents is argued to be compatible with God’s omniscience. In the modern branching time setting, the theory of the TRL is widely regarded (...) to suffer from several fundamental problems. In this paper we propose several new TRL semantics, each with differing degrees of success. This leads up to our final semantics, which is a cross between the TRL and supervaluationism. We discuss the notions of truth, validity and semantic consequence which result from our final semantics, and demonstrate some of its pleasing results. This account, we believe, answers the main objection in the literature, and thus places the TRL on the same level as any other competing semantics for future contingents. (shrink)

William Hasker has been one of the most trenchant and insightful critics of the revival of Molinism. He has focused on the “freedom problem”, a set of challenges designed to show that Molinism does not secure a place for genuinely free human action. These challenges focus on a key element in the Molinist story: the counterfactual conditionals of creaturely freedom. According to Molinism, these conditionals have contingent truth-values that are knowable to God prior to His decision of what world to (...) actualize. This divine “middle knowledge” is supposed to enable God to execute a detailed plan for world history without any loss of creaturely freedom. Hasker has argued that this middle knowledge nonetheless deprives us of the power to do otherwise than we do, a crucial element in human freedom and responsibility. I hope to accomplish three things in this paper. First, I want to step back a bit and explore the nature of the conditionals of creaturely free decision-making, bringing out some of the difficulties in delimiting their scope and nature. Second, I will explore the implications of different answers to an important question that has not been addressed in the literature: whether we have counterfactual power over the conditionals of divine freedom. And, third, I would like to recommend to Molinists a revision that offers a solution to the freedom problem. (shrink)

The paper tries to demonstrate the validity of Aristotle’s sea-battle argument, which is still considered as invalid by many authors. The first part presents the usual reconstruction of Aristotle’s argument and the reason for its rejection. It presents the late antique adoption of the argument as valid and strong by Ammonios and Boethius as well as its modern defence. In the second part, the elements that together assure the validity of the argument are combined and cast in the form of (...) two premisses, namely fact-correspondence and the unchangeability of facts. It is shown that these two presuppositions together assure the conclusion, i. e. the negation of bivalence for future contingents, and that they are explicitly stated in several of Aristotle’s texts and in Peri Hermeneias 9 in particular. (shrink)