Richard Gaskin

Fatalism, Bivalence and the Past

In his paper ‘Some Comments on Fatalism’, The Philosophical Quartery, 46 (1996), pp. 1–11, James Cargile offers an argument against the view that the correct response to fatalism is to restrict the principle of bivalence with respect to statements about future contingencies. His argument fails because it is question-begging. Further, he fails to give due weight to the reason behind this view, which is the desire to give an adequate account of the past/future asymmetry. He supposes that mere appeal to the direction of causation will suffice to explain this asymmetry, whereas in fact the causal asymmetry is the same as the temporal asymmetry, and so cannot ground it. I finish by drawing a connection between the power asymmetry (our ability to affect the future but not the past) and the memory/intention asymmetry.

Russell and richard brinkley on the unity of the proposition

Between 1903 and 1918 Russell made a number of attempts to understand the unity of the proposition, but his attempts all foundered on his failure clearly to distinguish between different senses in which the relation R might be said to relate a and b in the proposition aRb: he failed to distinguish between the relation as truth-maker and the relation as unifier, and consequently committed himself again and again to the unacceptable consequence that only true propositions are genuinely unified. There is an anticipation of this confusion in the writings of the fourteenth-century philosopher Richard Brinkley