Rethinking Time and Determinism: what happens to determinism when you take relativity seriously
Time and Science, edited by Remy Lestienne and Paul Harris, World Scientific Publishing.
Determinism is a centrally important notion for physics: it links time to laws and connects events along spatial surfaces to events along the temporal dimension. In philosophy determinism has played a central role as a challenge to free will. Relativity introduces changes in our conceptions of time and law. In this paper I examine what happens to determinism when we take those changes seriously. I argue that the effect of these changes is to undermine the common understanding of the significance of determinism. It is not true in a relativistic theory, for example, that the causal past of any point determines events at a finite distance in the causal future and the theory eliminates at the level of geometry the standpoint from which one can leverage the fixity of the past into the fixity of the future.
Determinism, Counterpredictive Devices, and the Impossibility of Laplacean Intelligences
In The Monist, Special Issue edited by Gordon Belot.
Causation, Free Will, and Naturalism
In Scientific Metaphysics, edited by Harold Kincaid, James Ladyman, and Don Ross, Oxford University Press, p. 208-236.
I address a threat to freedom based specifically on the worry that actions are causally necessitated antecedent conditions. Starting with a discussion of the folk notion of cause, I chronicle recent developments in the scientific understanding of causal concepts, showing how those developments undermine the threat from causal antecedents.
Decision and the Open Future
In The Future of the Philosophy of Time, edited by Adrian Bardon, Routledge, p. 149-168.
The familiar image of an open future that is in the process of coming into being remains shrouded in darkness, notwithstanding that it is part of most people’s pre-theoretic conception of time. This paper is an attempt to understand the source of these ideas and to see if they can be given literal content.
Freedom, Compulsion, and Causation
Psyche, 13/1, April.
Hume famously argued that the compulsion we associate with causal notions is borrowed from experience and illegitimately projected onto regularities in the world. Exploiting the interventionist analysis of causal relations, together with an insight about the degeneracy of one’s epistemic relations to one’s own actions, I defend a Humean position about the source of the idea of causal compulsion.
