30 juin-2 juil. 2025 Nantes (France)
Logical Freedom
Zardini Elia  1@  
1 : Universidad Complutense de Madrid

I'll apply a logic where the principle of persistence fails (A => B may be valid while A => A&B is not), together with its metaphysical justification in terms of instability (the obtaining of the state-of-affairs <A> determines the obtaining of <B> without coobtaining with it, see AUTHOR'S PAPER), to develop a new solution to the problem of logical fatalism (Gaskin [1995]).

If you have breakfast tomorrow, ‘You'll have breakfast tomorrow' is true today, and so today something holds which already entails that you'll have breakfast tomorrow, from which it might seem to follow that there's nothing you can do to avoid your breakfast tomorrow. By the same reasoning, if you don't have breakfast tomorrow, it might seem to follow that there's nothing you can do to get your breakfast tomorrow. Either way, there's nothing you can do today about your breakfast tomorrow.

To resist this fatalist conclusion, I'll argue that, if you're free to choose whether to have breakfast tomorrow, before your choice is unstable in that, if it obtains, it determines the obtaining of without however coobtaining with it, and vice versa. It's this mutual determination that makes either course of action available to you: your decision will stabilise this oscillation into one of its two poles. Therefore, if you have breakfast tomorrow, it's indeed the case that today something holds (i.e. the truth of ‘You will have breakfast tomorrow') which already entails that you'll have breakfast tomorrow, but that very same thing also entails instead that you won't have breakfast tomorrow (and, because of failure of persistence, it doesn't entail the absurd claim that you'll both have breakfast tomorrow and miss breakfast tomorrow). Your freedom consists in which of these two entailments to follow through by realising its conclusion.

References

AUTHOR'S PAPER

 Gaskin, R. [1995], The Sea Battle and the Master Argument: Aristotle and Diodorus Cronus on the Metaphysics of the Future, De Gruyter, Berlin.



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