TOF: The Open Future and The Causally Open Objective Present

Key data of the project

Description of the project

This research project aims to investigate a crucial theoretical problem related to our understanding and conceptualisation of time, namely the problem of the open future. There is a widespread belief that the future is open in the sense that there is a large set of possibilities ahead of us, of which it is not yet clear which ones will actually materialise. The problem of the open future is, in short, the problem of how exactly we should characterise and formally model this openness of the future.

This project is mainly concerned with two research questions. 1) What features of reality, if any, make the future open? 2) How should we model the openness of the future metaphysically and precisely? To answer these two research questions, I would like to offer a novel account of the open future, namely the causally open objective present (COOP). According to COOP, it is the metaphysically privileged status of the objective present that makes the future open. According to this view, the present is causally receptive because it is seen as the temporal place where events can occur that were not determined by the past and the laws of nature and consequently change the future. In other words, the core idea is that sometimes events can occur in the objective present that would not occur, i.e. they were not in the future of a present past time, and the occurrence of these events in the objective present changes the way the future will be.

This philosophical project examines the problem of the open future mainly from the perspective of the contemporary analytic metaphysics of time as well as from the perspective of temporal logic. One of the basic premises of this project is to understand philosophy as a modelling practice that can progress by providing increasingly better models. My proposed model of the open future is an attempt to provide a new and better understanding of the openness of the future. The project will also make extensive use of the methods of formal (temporal) logic, since the tools of logic are of paramount importance for i) understanding the structure and operation of a metaphysical theory, ii) determining the ontological meaning of a theory, and iii) stating the commitments and implications of a theory.

Although the COOP account I propose is anchored in the existing debate on the openness of the future, my project represents an absolute novelty in the literature, as to my knowledge no one has yet presented a complete and comprehensive account of the open future based on the causal openness of the present as I describe it.