Arabella Thais – In Defence of Fatalism: Exploring Complex Causality and a New Physics of Time
Why are we content for the past to be fixed and unchangeable, yet recoil at the thought that the future might be too?
We are content for the past to be fixed, yet we recoil at the thought that the future might be too. This talk makes the case for eternalism, the view that past, present and future are equally real, and asks why we are so attached to the idea that time flows and that only the present moment is real.
This presentation’s centre of gravity is Plotinus and the dialectic between eternity and time, with a glance at Schelling’s Ages of the World and its account of how what is already whole comes to be disclosed to us in succession. The notion of the block universe is where the argument begins, not where it ends: a model that gets the coexistence of past, present and future right while rendering it flat, static and deterministic in a way that satisfies neither the metaphysics nor the lived experience of time.
What follows is an account of complex causality in which events are shaped not only by what precedes them but by the whole to which they belong. The fundamental question is not so much whether the future is fixed, but what freedom means once we stop assuming that freedom requires an open one.
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About the speaker:
Arabella is a philosopher of aesthetics and metaphysics currently completing her doctorate at CIIS.
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