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The necessity of the past may simply be the principle tha... — Carmelics

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The necessity of the past may simply be the principle that past events are outside the class of causable events.

Free Will & Foreknowledge

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There is a temporal asymmetry in causability because everything causable is in the future.
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1.Retrocausation thought experiments (e.g., tachyons, closed causal loops) suggest causability is not strictly forward-directed in time.
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2.If physical possibility grounds the necessity of the past, contingent physical laws cannot underwrite the modal force needed for theological fatalism arguments.
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1.Ockham's distinction between hard and soft facts about the past shows that some past truths—like God's past beliefs—remain modally open relative to future actions.
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2.If soft past facts are causable via the future free acts they are about, then past events cannot be uniformly excluded from the class of causable events.
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Free Will & Foreknowledge

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If physical possibility grounds the necessity of the past, contingent physical l...If soft past facts are causable via the future free acts they are about, then pa...Ockham's distinction between hard and soft facts about the past shows that some ...Retrocausation thought experiments (e.g., tachyons, closed causal loops) suggest...

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There is a temporal asymmetry in causability because everything causable is in t...

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The idea of the necessity of the past may be confused.86%We have inherited from Ockham the idea that the past has a kind of nec...82%Gregory did not assert that the past is necessary beyond necessity ex ...81%Truths about the past are necessary — they cannot be other than they a...81%

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SEP: free-will-foreknowledge

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So the necessity of the past may simply be the principle that past events are outside the class of causable events. There is a temporal asymmetry in causability because everything causable is in the future. But some of the future is non-causable as well. Whether or not determinism is true, there are some events in the future that are causally necessary. If a future event E is necessary, it is causable, and not E is not causable. But if the necessity of the past is the non-causability of the past, it would be odd to pick out the class of propositions about the past as possessing an allegedly di...

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Type: claim
Perspectives: 3 (1 for, 2 against)
Edits: 1 edit