Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Future contingency, future indeterminacy, and grounding: comments on Todd

Book symposium: Patrick Todd, The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. 224 pp. $80.00

  • Short Commentary
  • Published:
International Journal for Philosophy of Religion Aims and scope Submit manuscript

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. Here I’m setting the Geachian understanding of will aside.

  2. This sort of reasoning has been developed by Mike Rea and Alicia Finch into an argument that Ockhamism is incompatible with presentism plus bivalence and thus requires an eternalist ontology. See Rea (2006) and Finch and Rea (2008).

  3. I discuss several such proposals, including Hartshorne’s, in Rhoda (2009).

  4. On p. 20 Todd (2021) says that “if we are presentist open futurists” then “TSB simply won’t give us what we want”. But nowhere does he show that TSB won’t give us what we want. He merely appeals to his own idiosyncratic intuition that truths about the past could remain true without a supervenience base. I, for one, don’t share that intuition.

  5. If it be suggested that the disquotation principle, True(p) iff p, ensures that even if there were nothing it would still be true that there is nothing, I reply that this is specious reasoning based on a misapplication of the principle. Disquotation is a metalinguistic principle, not a metaphysical principle. All it says is that we can use the truth predicate to switch between an object language wherein p and a metalanguage wherein True(p). The principle cannot be used to do ontological bootstrapping.

Works cited

  • Finch, A. and Michael Rea (2008). Presentism and Ockham’s Way Out. Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, 1, 1–17.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rea, M. (2006). Presentism and Fatalism. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 84(4), 511–524.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rhoda, A. R. (2009). Presentism, Truthmakers, and God. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 90, 41–62.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Todd, P. (2021). The Open Future: Why future contingents are all false. Oxford University Press.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis, USA

    Alan R. Rhoda

Authors
  1. Alan R. Rhoda
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alan R. Rhoda.

Additional information

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Rhoda, A.R. Future contingency, future indeterminacy, and grounding: comments on Todd. Int J Philos Relig 95, 103–109 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-024-09908-2

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-024-09908-2

Search

Navigation