Eternity and Fatalism

Fatalism is the thesis that we have no control over future events. Since the past used to be future, fatalism is actually the thesis that we do not have control over any events and never did. But the inžuential fatalist arguments conclude that we do not control future events. e futurity of the fated events is essential to the claim that they are fated. We allegedly have no control over the future because we have no control over the past and we do not control the connection between past and future identied by the fatalist. In the rst part of this paper I want to investigate this link between fatalism and temporality, and I will then explore the issue of what happens to fatalist arguments when we move outside the temporal domain. At the most general level, the three historically most important fatalist argu-

ments all have the same form: We cannot control the past; the past entails the future; therefore, we cannot control the future. is is the basic form of standard arguments for logical fatalism, for theological fatalism, and for causal fatalism. In each case, the proponent of the argument is usually not a defender of the fatalist thesis. Rather, the proponent typically takes for granted that the fatalist conclusion is false andproposes the argument as away to force us to reject one ormore premises of the argument. Other philosophers reject the validity of the arguments. I am not going to focus on the specics of either of these responses since I am interested in investigating the general form of the fatalist threat and its connection with time. Although the standard fatalist arguments say, in ešect, that we cannot control

the future because we cannot control the past, none of the arguments says that we cannot control the future only because we cannot control the past. Each of the arguments identies something else that we cannot control in addition to the past and the argument then has the form: (1)We cannot control the past, and we cannot control x. (2)e past + x entails the future.erefore, (3) We cannot control the future. Let us look briežy at how each kind of fatalist argument has this structure. (Logical Fatalism) e logical fatalist argues that we cannot control the past truth

of propositions about the future, nor dowe have any control over the fact that

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the truth value of a proposition is immutable. Together these assumptions entail that the future will be what it will be.erefore, we cannot control the future.1