Fatalism Toward Past and Future

Abstract

Richard Taylor has enlivened various fields of analytical philosophy during the past three decades, especially with his ingenious attacks upon commonly held beliefs. I recall being particularly stimulated to reflection by his challenge to one pair of seeming truisms: our certainty that we no longer have any control over what has already happened; and the complementary assumption that some forthcoming events — notably our own deliberate acts — do remain ‘up to us’. Taylor has argued separately for backwards causation, and for a fatalistic view of what is going to occur. Most significantly, he seems able to transform every objection we produce against fatalism into an unwanted rationale for supposing that we can shape bygone events — and vice versa.