This article attempts to spell out more clearly the Thomist, the Openist, and the Molinist approaches to divine providence, and to indicate the strengths and weaknesses of these three positions. It begins by discussing both the traditional notion of divine providence and the libertarian picture of freedom. The article then argues that each theory of divine providence has its advantages and disadvantages. Each has had numerous able and creative defenders. As with most philosophical disputes, one can hardly expect this debate (...) to come to an end. The field of battle may shift more clearly in the coming years to considerations of which view, when applied to specific doctrines, offers us the most satisfying overall position. Still, it seems quite likely that all three positions will continue to be defended for the foreseeable future. (shrink)

Ryan Wasserman explores a range of fascinating puzzles raised by the possibility of time travel, with entertaining examples from physics, science fiction, and popular culture, and he draws out their implications for our understanding of time, tense, freedom, fatalism, causation, counterfactuals, laws of nature, persistence, change, and mereology.

In this paper we critically evaluate Trenton Merricks’s recent attempt to provide a “new” way of defending compatibilism about divine foreknowledge and human freedom. We take issue with Merricks’s claim that his approach is fundamentally different from Ockhamism. We also seek to highlight the implausibility of Merricks’s rejection of the assumption of the fixity of the past, and we also develop a critique of the Merricks’s crucial notion of “dependence.”.

Many philosophers maintain that the ability to do otherwise is compatible with comprehensive divine foreknowledge but incompatible with the truth of causal determinism. But the Fixity of the Past principle underlying the rejection of compatibilism about the ability to do otherwise and determinism appears to generate an argument also for the incompatibility of the ability to do otherwise and divine foreknowledge. By developing an account of ability that appeals to the notion of explanatory dependence, we can replace the Fixity of (...) the Past with a principle that does not generate this difficulty. I develop such an account and defend it from objections. I also explore some of the account's implications, including whether the account is consistent with presentism. (shrink)

In this paper I defend two conclusions: that time travel journeys to the past are not undertaken freely and, more generally, that nobody is free between the earliest arrival time and the latest departure time of a time travel journey to the past. Time travel to the past destroys freedom on a global scale.

It has sometimes been suggested that backwards time travel always incurs causal loops. I show that this is mistaken, by describing worlds where backwards time travel occurs and yet no causal loops occur. Arguments that backwards time travel can occur without causal loops have been given before in the literature, but I show that those arguments are unconvincing.

Suppose that time t is just a few moments from now. And suppose that the proposition that Jones sits at t was true a thousand years ago. Does the thousand-years-ago truth of that proposition imply that Jones's upcoming sitting at t will not be free? This article argues that it does not. It also argues that Jones even now has a choice about the thousand-years-ago truth of that Jones sits at t . Those arguments do not require the complex machinery (...) of Ockhamism, with its distinction between hard facts and soft facts; indeed, those arguments do not require any complex machinery at all. Instead, those arguments are built on an uncontroversial understanding of the idea that truth depends on the world. In the final section of the article, those arguments are extended to show that foreknowledge of an action does not threaten that action's freedom. (shrink)

The bulk of the essay “Truth and Freedom” (Philosophical Review 118 [2009]: 29–57) opposes fatalism, which is the claim that if there is a true proposition to the effect that an action A will occur, then A will not be free. But that essay also offers a new way to reconcile divine foreknowledge and human freedom. In “The Truth about Freedom: A Reply to Merricks” (Philosophical Review 120 [2011]: 97–115), John Martin Fischer and Patrick Todd raise a number of objections (...) to “Truth and Freedom,” most of which are objections to its treatment of foreknowledge. Their central complaint seems to be that that treatment is, despite its claims to the contrary, merely a form of Ockhamism—and a poorly developed form of Ockhamism at that. This essay replies to Fischer and Todd's specific objections. But, more importantly, it further clarifies the fundamental differences between the way it reconciles divine foreknowledge and human freedom and the Ockhamist's way. In particular, this essay further demonstrates that when it comes to divine foreknowledge's compatibility with human freedom, the fundamental question is not the Ockhamist's question of whether God's beliefs about what an agent will do in the future are “hard facts.” Rather, the fundamental question is whether God's beliefs about what an agent will do in the future depend on what that agent will do in the future. (shrink)