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Determinism, the Remote Past, and the Causal or Determinational Structure of the Universe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

David Sapire
David Sapire*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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Abstract

Łukasiewicz and, more recently, other philosophers have cast doubts on arguments from one version of determinism to another: roughly, from the view that every event (condition, state) has a cause or is determined, to the view that the remotest possible past determines the present and future. This paper defends a special class of such arguments. It identifies constraints on the relation of determination under which the arguments concerned are valid. And, by reference to the overall causal or determinational structure of the universe, it argues that the constraints themselves are highly plausible.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 56 , Issue 3 , September 1989 , pp. 474 - 483
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I am grateful to Michael Pendlebury, Flint Schier, and an anonymous referee for Philosophy of Science for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. I also acknowledge financial support by the Human Sciences Research Council for research on which I have drawn here.

References

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