Abstract
According to the report of Epictetus (Dissertationes II, 19), Diodorus’
“You couldn't have it if you did want it,” the Queen said.“The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday--but never jam today.” “Itmust come sometimes to ‘jam today”, Alice objected. Lewis Carroll Alice through the Looking Glass
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Notes
In writing and rewriting this essay I have had the benefit of comment and encouragement from various people who have heard or read it in some form, most notably Jules Vuillemin, Jonathan Barnes (see also notes 7 and 12), John Ackrill, Gerald Cohen and Myles Burnyeat.
See Jules Vuillemin, Necessité ou Contingence: l’Aporie de Diodore et les Systèmes Philosophiques (Editions de Minuit, Paris 1984), pp.32–39ff., 50ff.
Cp. Jennifer Hornsby, ‘Which Physical Events are Mental Events?, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1980, ad init; Richard LCartwright, Philosophical Essays (MIT Bradford Cambridge Mass. 1987) p. 36. A related possibility would be lekta as the Stoics understood them. But to appeal to these would import a strain of anachronism, perhaps.
Cp. Vuillemin, p.34; David Wiggins, ‘Towards a Reasonable Libertarianism’, Essays on Freedom and Action, ed. Ted Honderich (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1973), § III, to be reprinted (with the correction of an error in the first reprinting) in Needs, Values, Truth (2nd edition, Oxford: Blackwell 1990-91). See § 4 there. Note that if the second time specification is absorbed into the act description, what results is still the denomination of an act (something general), but one whose instances are then limited to the specified time. The idea of cost is important for many purposes. But more traditional concerns are restored if we fix this parameter so that the incompatibilist’s “cannot” means “cannot at any cost”.
Lest there be difficulty in finding any agreed background for the dispute or we run out of historical knowledge, let it start out from this
Cp. Rod Bertolet and William L Rowe, ‘The Fatalism of “Diodorus Cronus’”, Analysis 39, 1970, p., who write, referring to [Diodorus Cronus] ‘Time, Truth and Ability’, Analysis 25, 1965, that “[Diodorus Cronus] mistakenly infers from’ stilpo is unable to do something at t1’ that is logically sufficient for the falsity of’ stilpo walks through the Diomean Gate at t2’ that Stilpo is unable at t1 to do something logically sufficient for the falsity of’ stilpo walks through the Diomean Gate at t2”-
Classical Review XXXVI no. 1 (1986), pp.70–79.
For a challenging attempt to domesticate this kind of claim, see Martin Davies, “Boethius and others on Divine Foreknowledge”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64 (1983), especially pages 319, 322.I hope that those who understand Chrysippus better than I think I do will study the possibility of interpreting him in the light of Davies’ idea.
Suppose there is an indeterministic process which, for all that is fixed by its nature or its content, can at t issue in different outcomes after t. At t, the newspaper is right by my hand, say. It may or may not end up in my hands. And suppose now is arbitrarily close to t, so that the principle (A) does not suffice to necessitate that which happens at t. (There are subtle questions here, on which see also the next paragraph.)
Cp. the position apparently taken by Chrysippus in Stobaeus 1 142, 2-6, translated as follows in A A. Long and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic Pbilosophers I (Cambridge 1987), page 297. “...bodies are divided to infinity, and likewise things comparable to bodies such as surface, line, place, void and time. But although these are divided to infinity, a body does not consist of infinitely many bodies, and the same applies to surface, line, and place....” (My italics.)
The terms “perfective” and “imperfective” begin life in grammars of explicitly aspectual languages like Russian. There is a rough and ready equivalence between “imperfective” and “progressive” in the usage of theoretical linguistics. For the usage of Russian grammarians, see B.O. Unbegaun, Russian Grammar (Oxford 1957), chapter XII.
Here again I record a debt to Barnes.
Cp. again Bertolet and Rowe cited note 6.
Never content with anything short of everything, some will now ask what it would really be like to be able now to do otherwise now. My own answer is an incompatibilist one. Let now be a stretch, not an instant. Then my ability now to do A now when I am actually doing B consists not in my capacity at this instant to do something different at this instant but in the fact (if it is a fart and I really can now do now each of A and B) that within the stretch of time designated as now there is a juncture at which the event consisting of my shortly starting to do B is possible, and at which the event consisting of my shortly starting to do A is possible. That requires the falsity of universal determinism. But the falsity of that general thesis is consistent both with “every event has a cause” and with the simple exclusion principle between acts that was used in V for the derivation of (D) from (A) and (B). And surely this gives what the possibilist wants. For if the situation is as described and there is the said juncture, then in virtue of all this obtaining I can count this afternoon as able this afternoon to do A this afternoon and able this afternoon to do B this afternoon. I suppose I have here to reiterate the view (op.cit. note 4; Needs, Values, Truth, p. 290ff) that it will not follow from such a description of the situation, unless by an argument that simply begs the question (e.g. the assumption that “not physically determined” means or implies “random”), that my doing A, when that is what happens, is random. It is consistent with the denial of universal determinism that, when I do A, I can have had my reasons: and that my having those reasons can explain why I did A and, on occasion, rationalize my doing A.
Cp. Long and Sedley, op.cit., page 51.
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Wiggins, D. (1991). Temporal Necessity, Time and Ability: a philosophical commentary on Diodorus Cronus’ Master Argument as given in the interpretation of Jules Vuillemin. In: Brittan, G.G. (eds) Causality, Method, and Modality. The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 48. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3348-7_11
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