Seminar cercetare DFT „Eternalism and Libertarian Free Will: Are We Free without an Open Future?”
Următoarea conferință online din cadrul seminarului de cercetare al Departamentului de Filosofie Teoretică în parteneriat cu CELFIS din semestrul al II-lea al anului 2022/2023 va fi susținută de Bogdan Dumitrescu (Universitatea din București). Prezentarea sa este intitulată „Eternalism and Libertarian Free Will: Are We Free without an Open Future?”. Conferința se va desfășura miercuri, 10 mai, orele 17.00-18.30, în amfiteatrul „Titu Maiorescu”, etajul 1, de la sediul Facultățîi de Filosofie: Splaiul Independenței nr. 204, București 060024. Iată un rezumat extins al comunicării sale: „Free will is taken to be in conflict with determinism. This is the most popular way of framing the problem of free will. In this presentation I am concerned with a different, less popular, way of viewing the problem: the inconsistency of free will with certain metaphysical theories of time. The idea that freedom is actually in tension with our metaphysical assumptions on time has been popularized by Carl Hoefer (2002), but even before his article was published, philosophers such as Niall Shanks (1994) have argued that if certain metaphysical theories of time are true, then human freedom is under threat. If, for example, the future is settled and not open to possibilities, then how can we still maintain that we have control over future events?
The A-theory of time is the one that seems to accommodate best our everyday assumptions about time such as the belief in temporal passage, an objective present and an open future. However, it is eternalism (also known as the block universe or the B-theory of time) that seems to be best compatible with contemporary physical theories, but this theory, as Shanks (1994) and others have argued, is in conflict with freedom of the will. This is because eternalism holds that there is no ontological distinction of kind between past events, present events and future events. Since all temporal events are equally real in eternalism, this means that future events are just as real and fixed as past and present events. Consequently, this would mean that the future is not unsettled and open to possibilities, as commonly believed.
This conflicts with the libertarian conception of free will. Freedom understood as the ability to do otherwise requires that an agent have multiple possible alternatives from which to choose at the moment of choice. But if eternalism is true and the future is not open, then it seems, at least prima facie, that freedom to do otherwise is a mere illusion which exists only due to our epistemic ignorance of what the future will be.
In this talk, my aim is to briefly survey the most popular metaphysical theories within the analytic philosophy of time (A-theories and the B-theory) and explore the compatibility between the libertarian free will and eternalism (more specifically, the compatibility between freedom and a fixed, non-open future). I will also briefly comment on Nathan Oaklander’s (2004) response to Niall Shanks’ main argument.”
