Abstract:
The openness of the future is one of a number of common sense but metaphysically opaque intuitions people have about time. The common sense view takes it that at least some things are such that it is possible they might or might not occur in the future. It seems to be the case now that the future is not yet fully settled. The past on the other hand seems fully settled and determinate. Common sense is generally committed to a package view: the open future and the closed past. This thesis is concerned with providing a metaphysical theory of the open future: of what the unsettledness of the future consists of. I defend the Ochkamist open future. The theory is Ockhamist insofar as it holds to the notion of a true or actual future. I claim nomic indeterminism is sufficient for the unsettledness of the open future. Furthermore I argue Ockhamism says nothing about the closed past. Against Ockhamism I discuss three competing views of the open future: No futurism, Ontic Vagueness, and Branching Concretism. They are broadly characterised as claiming something stronger over and above nomic indeterminism. The idea they pose is that the future must not fully be determinate; that is to say it is indeterminate what the actual future is. I argue that the theoretical costs of these theories are too high or that they simply fail to capture the openness intuition.