The End is Near: Grim Reapers and Endless Futures.

José Benardete developed a famous paradox involving a beginningless set of items each member of which satisfies some predicate just in case no earlier member satisfies it. The Grim Reaper version of this paradox has recently been employed in favour of various finitist metaphysical theses, ranging fr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Mind (0026-4423) Vol. 133; no. 532; pp. 1057 - 1078
Main Author: Schmid, Joseph C
Format: Article
Published: Oxford University Press / USA Oct2024
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Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Description
Summary:José Benardete developed a famous paradox involving a beginningless set of items each member of which satisfies some predicate just in case no earlier member satisfies it. The Grim Reaper version of this paradox has recently been employed in favour of various finitist metaphysical theses, ranging from temporal finitism to causal finitism to the discrete nature of time. Here, I examine a new challenge to these finitist arguments—namely, the challenge of implying that the future cannot be endless. In particular, I develop future-oriented Benardete paradoxes and examine their epistemic symmetry with past-oriented paradoxes.