Incompatibilism and fatalism: reply to Loss

Freedom, responsibility and the past: A consideration of the new consequence argument (Proceedings of the CAPE International Workshops, 2013. Part II: The CAPE International Conference “A Frontier of Philosophy of Time”)

“…Van Inwagen seems to conceive it as nomological possibility relative to the past, though I should note that he does not sufficiently articulate it in some respects 4 . To develop it fully, suppose that a proposition p 1 truly describes the state of a world w at a time t 1 .…”

“…Before seeing Campbell's criticism, I will introduce another issue which I think would turn out to be important when we consider the problem caused by (4).…”

“…The characteristic of the third argument is, on one hand, its use of a sentential operator 'N' such that 'Np' means that "p and no one has, or ever had, any choice about whether p" (van Inwagen 1983: 93) and, on the other, its appeal to the proposition P 0 about a remote past "before there had ever been any human beings" (van Inwagen 1983: 96, 184). In what 4 It's not clear exactly which items are temporally indexed. In my formulation, following the recent writers, I stipulate that the verb 'render' is time-indexed as well as propositions.…”

Can the Incompatibilist Get Past the No Past Objection?

“…It may sound more plausible to accept the principle that nobody can right now have a choice about the present state of the world. This principle of the necessity of the present is exploited in Loss's Renewed Argument for incompatibilism (Loss , ; Campbell ), and is also implied by Finch's trans‐temporality thesis that is crucial in her defence of the consequence argument (Finch , forthcoming). However, Bailey gave several plausible counterexamples to the necessity of the present in his discussion of Loss's argument (Bailey , 365–368) and argued that it would incur similar costs as in the first option to resist those counterexamples.…”

Incompatibilism and the Past*

“…Adam is in the grips of an oscillating eternal recurrence. He spends his time growing ‘older’ and getting ‘younger’.’ See Campbell (2010) for further discussion.…”