Seminar cercetare DFT „The B-theory of Time and Libertarian Free Will”
Următoarea conferință din cadrul seminarului de cercetare al Departamentului de Filosofie Teoretică în parteneriat cu CELFIS va fi susținută de dl. Bogdan Dumitrescu, doctorand al Departamentului de Filosofie Teoretică.
O sursă timpurie a cercetărilor pe care le va prezenta poate fi regăsită aici:https://www.youtube.com/watch?
„In the more recent analytic philosophy of time there has been too little attention toward the idea that some metaphysical theories of time may conflict with free will. While the problem of logical fatalism has been a popular subject in the philosophy of time, much less attention has been given to the relationship between the metaphysics of time and free will. Authors such as Nathan Oaklander (1998), Carl Hoefer (2002) and Jennan Ismael (2016) have defended the idea that eternalism (or the B-theory) does not pose a threat to human free will, but it would seem that their account of freedom is more in line with the traditional compatibilist view of free will.
It is possible that certain other conceptions of free will may be under threat by certain metaphysics of time. For example, when agents make decisions, they typically suppose that there is some sense in which the future is open to possibilities. Libertarian free will (the ability to do otherwise) requires an agent to have (at the moment of choice) multiple alternate possibilities from which to choose. But if eternalism (or the B-theory of time) is true, then it would seem, at least prima facie, that the future is not open to possibilities. Eternalism, after all, is the thesis that all events (including past and future events) are equally real. Future events are just as real as past and present events according to this theory of time. This could imply that the future is metaphysically closed and fixed. To the libertarian, this may mean that the only choice available to any agent is the one that is already part of the actual future. One can thus believe that eternalism is incompatible with libertarian free will.As Niall Shanks (1994) argued, libertarian free will seems to be incompatible with such a theory of time. To Shanks, a theory of time in which future events and objects are ontologically equal to past and present ones is inhospitable to libertarian free will. He claimed that one of the reasons for this is because the agent lacks existential control: the ability to bring events and objects into existence.
Recently Ben Page (2022) has argued that the incompatibility between eternalism and libertarian free will is merely apparent. The two may indeed be compatible. In this paper I argue, contrary to Ben Page (2022), that a strong case can be made for the thesis that eternalism is not compatible with libertarian free will. I briefly survey the A- and B-theories of time, present Shanks’ (1994) argument and defend my own argument for the thesis that eternalism and libertarian free will are incompatible. I then respond to possible objections in order to defend the thesis.”
Conferința se va desfășura vineri, 26 aprilie, orele 16.00-18.00, la sala de consiliu de la etajul 1 al Facultății de Filosofie din Splaiul Independenței nr. 204, București 060024. Pentru mai multe detalii, vă rugăm urmăriți pagina Facebook „Seminarul Departamentului de Filosofie Teoretica UniBuc”.
