Ryan Wasserman

Many incompatibilists have claimed that divine foreknowledge would rob us of the ability to do otherwise, even though that knowledge would not itself play any role in producing our behavior (either in the actual world or in counterfactual situations where we try to do otherwise). Some philosophers have rejected this position on the grounds that it would require a mysterious non-causal constraint on ability. I argue that this worry is overstated, and I suggest a new way for the incompatibilist to understand the supposed shackles of foreknowledge.

We normally think of the past as being fixed and unalterable. Many philosophers have held the same view about the future. Our actions may be able to influence the future by bringing about certain events, but we do not change the future since it will always have been the case that the relevant events were going to be brought about in that way. This is the standard view. The standard view has been challenged by a number of philosophers—most notably, Peter Geach. Geach’s view has seen renewed attention in recent years, but I will argue that the original impetus for the view is mistaken. Geach’s argument for the mutability of the future fails, and this failure has important things to teach us about the nature of prevention, the requirements for change, and the semantics of past-tense progressives.

Intrinsic properties are those which cannot be had or lacked in virtue of other things. Being a square is intrinsic, in this sense, whereas being next to a square is not. But what, exactly, counts as an “other thing” in this context? As it turns out, this is a surprisingly difficult question. I provide a critical assessment of three existing proposals (in terms of identity, mereology, and ontology), before developing my own, alternative account. Along the way, we highlight ways in which this project intersects with other philosophical issues, including debates over the nature of existence, the essentiality of origins, and the truth of priority monism.

This is a paper about time travel and what it teaches us about freedom. I argue that cases of time travel bring out an important difference between two ways of thinking about “the past”—either in terms of time itself, or in terms of causation. This ambiguity naturally transfers over to our talk about things like fixity, determinism, and incompatibilism. Moreover, certain cases of time travel suggest that our freedom is not constrained by the temporal past _per se_, but by our own causal histories. This, in turn, raises a number of interesting questions about the formulation of incompatibilism and the broader debate over freedom.

Assume that, even with a time machine, Tim does not have the ability to travel to the past and kill Grandfather. Why would that be? And what are the implications for traditional debates about freedom? We argue that there are at least two satisfactory explanations for why Tim cannot kill Grandfather. First, if an agent’s behavior at time _t_ is causally dependent on fact _F_, then the agent cannot perform an action (at _t_) that would require _F_ to have not obtained. Second, if an agent’s behavior at time _t_ is causally dependent on fact _F_, then the agent cannot perform an action (at _t_) that would prevent _F_ from obtaining. These two explanations have distinct upshots for more traditional debates over freedom. The first implies that causal determinism is incompatible with the ability to do otherwise and also raises questions about the traditional arguments for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and the ability to do otherwise; the second does neither. However, both explanations imply that the Molinist account of divine providence renders agents unable to do otherwise, at least in certain circumstances.

The idea that some of God's past beliefs depend on our future actions has a long history, going back to Origen in the third century CE. However, it is not always clear what this idea amounts to, since it is not always clear what kind of dependence is at issue. This paper surveys five different interpretations of dependence and, in each case, considers the implications for the debate over theological fatalism. Along the way, we discuss a number of related issues, including the nature of explanation, the scope of metaphysical grounding, and the possibility of backward causation.

We argue against accounting for dispositions (and of the progressive aspect) in terms of a fundamentally teleological metaphysics, and we defend our previous conditional account from some novel objections. In “Teleological Dispositions,” Nick Kroll offers a novel theory of dispositions in terms of primitive directed states. Kroll is clear that his notion of directedness “outstrips talk of goals, purposes, design, and function”, and that it commits him to “primitive teleological facts”. This notion may strike some as outdated and unscientific, but Kroll argues that it has an important theoretical role to play. In particular, he holds that a primitive notion of directedness can provide a theory of dispositions, an explanation of the link between dispositions and conditionals, and an account of the progressive aspect in English. In this paper, we raise some worries for each of these claims.

In an earlier paper in these pages (2008), we explored the puzzling link between dispositions and conditionals. First, we rehearsed the standard counterexamples to the simple conditional analysis and the refined conditional analysis defended by David Lewis. Second, we attacked a tempting response to these counterexamples: what we called the ‘getting specific strategy’. Third, we presented a series of structural considerations that pose problems for many attempts to understand the link between dispositions and conditionals. Finally, we developed our own account of this link, which avoids all of the standard counterexamples and comports with the relevant structural considerations. In this paper, we reply to some objections.

The debate over persistence is often cast as a disagreement between two rival theories—the perdurantist theory that objects persist through time by having different temporal parts at different times, and the endurantist theory that objects persist through time by being wholly present at different times. This way of framing the debate over persistence involves both an important insight and an important error. Unfortunately, the error is often embraced and the insight is often ignored. This paper aims to correct both of these mistakes, and thus clarify the debate over persistence