"The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits." G.K. Chesterton

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Fatalism Necessarily fails if we have a peek into the content of fate

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The philosopher Richard Taylor in his essay "Fate" introduces the possibility of some character, Osmo to have access to his Fatalistic bibliography. Assuming Fatalism is true (in the sense of a pre-existing body of truth, about past present and future), is it consistent to permit an arbitrary degree of epistemological insight into "facts" aobout one's life? A related question would be whether one can falsify the content of this Fatalistic prophecy about oneself?

I wrote an essay on this topic recently and used some plausibility arguments and also a purely logical one. The purely logical proof of the incompatibility of our insight into the content of Osmo type book and the content actually obtaining is above. In particular the proof demonstrates the limits of what the book can contain if one was allowed a peek.

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