The Future

`The future is a touchstone for our attitudes to time and reality, to causality and freedom, to responsibility and creativity. If we believe that the future exists in just the same way as the present and past do, we have a simple and economical view of reality, but one in which many of the characteristic features of time are lacking, in which there is nothing to pick out the present "now", or to give a sense of becoming, in which freedom is an illusion, everything will be as it will be, and there is nothing new under the sun. If, on the other hand, we believe that the past and present exist but not the future, except as some set of tenuous possibilities, then we begin to understand why the past is unalterable and the future open, and have a view of reality that acounts for the peculiar status of the present and our sense of time as becoming.' Does the future exist? If it does, how can we decide what it is going to be? If it does not, how can we talk about it at all? In discussing these questions J. R. Lucas has to offer answers also to questions about the nature of time, of reality and of truth.
He considers theological determinism as an especially understandable version of fatalism, and suggests a new analysis of knowledge and foreknowledge. Modal logic is introduced from a new point of view, and developed to include tense logic, for which a special semantics - `Tree semantics' - is worked out, so as to clear up confusions, and resolve traditional problems. The book is aimed at philosophers of science and religion and general philosophy, especially in US where sophistication in this area is higher.