Abstract
One of Professor Richard Taylor’s greatest contributions in philosophy is his work on fatalism. He has repeatedly attempted to make the strongest possible case for fatalism,1 sometimes hoping to vindicate and other times to refute it once and for all. We might find his arguments compelling if we were not so certain that fatalism must be false. It is much easier, however, to see that something must be wrong with them than it is to say what is wrong with them. Yet we are obliged to refute each one or else admit that our denial of fatalism is unjustified. The purpose of this paper is to refute the argument which seems to underlie Taylor’s most recent defense of fatalism in the second edition of Metaphysics.2
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Notes
See especially Richard Taylor, ‘Fatalism’, Philosophical Review 71 (1962), 56–66; ‘Fatalism and Ability’, Analysis 23 (1962), 25–27; “Diodorus Cronus” (i.e., Richard Taylor and Steven M. Cahn), ‘Time, Truth and Ability’, Analysis 25 (1965), 137–141.
Richard Taylor, Metaphysics, 2nd ed., Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1974, pp. 58–71.
Ibid., p. 59.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 65.
I owe this point to Professor José Benardete.
R. D. Bradley, `Must the Future Be What It Is Going to Be?’, Mind 68 (1959), 193208. Reprinted in Richard M. Gale (ed.), The Philosophy of Time: A Collection of Essays, Anchor-Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1967, pp. 232–251.
Ibid., p. 241. A. J. Ayer defends this thesis in `Fatalism’, in The Concept of a Person and Other Essays, St. Martin’s, New York, 1963, pp. 235–238.
Bradley, op. cit., p. 241. to Ibid., p. 242.
Willard Van Orman Quine, Elementary Logic, rev. ed., Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1966, p. 6. The locution “true once and for all” might be misleading, since it apparently allows the question, `When is p true?’ to be meaningful, since it can be answered, `p is true once and for all’. Following a suggestion by Peter van Inwagen, perhaps it would be clearer to use `true (if true) and false (if false) — independently of time’.
Bradley, op. cit., p. 243.
Richard Taylor says in `The Problem of Future Contingencies’, Philosophical Review 66 (1957), 18, that “… in fact one cannot convey the same information and avoid the systematic ambiguity of `now’ and `then’ just by substituting dates for tenses. This can be done only if an additional statement is supplied in order to complete the information so easily completed by the use of tense, and this additional statement must contain a temporal reference to now. That is, it must be a statement to the effect that the date mentioned is earlier than, contemporaneous with, or future to now — precisely the thing that the use of dates was intended to avoid”. This seems absolutely correct. See also Steven M. Cahn, Fate, Logic, and Time, Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 1967, pp. 34–35, 127. He agrees with Taylor that it is impossible to translate a tensed sentence into a tenseless one without loss of meaning, but he shows this on epistemological grounds. One can know the `fact given’ in a tenseless proposition without thereby knowing the fact given in the original tensed one, so the fact given in the original tensed one has not been preserved by the translation.
Bradley, op. cit., p. 244.
It is suggestive that there is no temptation to translate `placed’ sentences into `placeless’ ones to insure that it makes no sense to ask where the propositions expressed by the placeless ones axe true.
C. D. Broad, Scientific Thought, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1923, pp. 70, 73.
Ibid., p. 66.
Gilbert Ryle, Dilemmas, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1954, p. 27.
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Naylor, M.B. (1980). Fatalism and Timeless Truth. In: Van Inwagen, P. (eds) Time and Cause. Philosophical Studies Series in Philosophy, vol 19. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3528-5_4
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