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218The Open Future: Why Future Contingents are All False, by Patrick Todd (review)Ratio 36 (1): 82-85. 2022.Review of Patrick Todd's The Open Future (2021, OUP)
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1082Superdeterminism: a reappraisalSynthese 200 (5): 1-20. 2022.This paper addresses a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics, i.e. superdeterminism. In short, superdeterminism i) takes the world to be fundamentally deterministic, ii) postulates hidden variables, and iii) contra Bell, saves locality at the cost of violating the principle of statistical independence. Superdeterminism currently enjoys little support in the physics and philosophy communities. Many take it to posit the ubiquitous occurrence of hard-to-digest conspiratorial and coincident…Read more
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754Branching time and doomsdayRatio 35 (2): 79-90. 2022.Branching time is a popular theory of time that is intended to account for the openness of the future. Generally, branching-time models the openness of the future by positing a multiplicity of concrete alternative futures mirroring all the possible ways the future could unfold. A distinction is drawn in the literature among branching-time theories: those that make use of moment-based structures and those that employ history-based ones. In this paper, I introduce and discuss a particular kind of …Read more
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394The future ain’t what it used to be: Strengthening the case for mutable futurismSynthese 199 (3-4): 10569-10585. 2021.This paper explores mutable futurism, the view according to which the future can literally change—that is, it can happen that a future time t changes from containing an event E to lacking it. Mutable futurism has received little attention so far, and the details and implications of the view are underexplored in the literature. For instance, it currently lacks a precise metaphysical model and a formal semantics. Although we do not endorse mutable futurism, our goal here is to strengthen the case …Read more
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635Purely Theoretical ExplanationsPhilosophia 49 (1): 133-154. 2020.This paper introduces a new kind of explanation that we describe as ‘purely theoretical’. We first present an example, E, of what we take to be a case of purely theoretical explanation. We then show that the explanation we have in mind does not fit neatly into any of the existing categories of explanation. We take this to give us prima facie motivation for thinking that purely theoretical explanation is a distinctive kind of explanation. We then argue that it can earn its keep via application to…Read more
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841Back to the (Branching) FutureActa Analytica 35 (2): 181-194. 2020.The future is different from the past. What is past is fixed and set in stone. The future, on the other hand, is open insofar as it holds numerous possibilities. Branching-tree models of time account for this asymmetry by positing an ontological difference between the past and the future. Given a time t, a unique unified past lies behind t, whereas multiple alternative existing futures lie ahead of t. My goal in this paper is to show that there is an incompatibility between the way branching-tre…Read more
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697Time Travel and the Immutability of the Past within B-Theoretical ModelsPhilosophia 47 (4): 1011-1021. 2019.The goal of this paper is to defend the general tenet that time travelers cannot change the past within B-theoretical models of time, independently of how many temporal dimensions there are. Baron Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 98, 129–147 offered a strong argument intended to reach this general conclusion. However, his argument does not cover a peculiar case, i.e. a B-theoretical one-dimensional model of time that allows for the presence of internal times. Loss Pacific Philosophical Quarterly…Read more
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270Review of Paradoxes of Time Travel (review)Argumenta 6 381-384. 2018.Book review of Wasserman, R. (2017), Paradoxes of Time Travel, OUP.
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893Fatalism and Future ContingentsAnalytic Philosophy 60 (3): 1-14. 2019.In this paper I address issues related to the problem of future contingents and the metaphysical doctrine of fatalism. Two classical responses to the problem of future contingents are the third truth value view and the all-false view. According to the former, future contingents take a third truth value which goes beyond truth and falsity. According to the latter, they are all false. I here illustrate and discuss two ways to respectively argue for those two views. Both ways are similar in spirit …Read more
Salzburg, Salzburg State, Austria
Areas of Specialization
Time |
Topics in Free Will, Misc |
Time Travel |
Areas of Interest
Time |
Theories of Free Will |