No-futurism and Metaphysical Contingentism

Baptiste Le Bihan (1)

1 EA 1270 - Philosophie des normes

According to no-futurism, past and present entities are real, but future ones are not. This view faces a skeptical challenge (Bourne 2002, 2006, Braddon-Mitchell, 2004): if no-futurism is true, how do you know you are present? I shall propose a new skeptical argument based on the physical possibility of Gödelian worlds (1949). This argument shows that a no-futurist has to endorse a metaphysical contingentist reading of no-futurism, the view that no-futurism is contingently true. But then, the no-futurist has to face a new skeptical challenge: how do you know that you are in a no-futurist world?

Keywords: Metaphysics; No-futurism; Growing block; Metaphysical contingentism; Skepticism; Time travel

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Philosophy

Baptiste Le Bihan. No-futurism and Metaphysical Contingentism. Axiomathes, 2014, 24 (4), pp.483-497. ⟨10.1007/s10516-014-9236-9⟩. ⟨hal-00997544⟩