著者

小川 吉昭 Ogawa Yoshiaki オガワ ヨシアキ

出版者

県立広島大学

雑誌

県立広島大学人間文化学部紀要 (ISSN:21865590)

巻号頁・発行日

no.8, pp.103-114, 2013-03

---

In "Dilemmas" Gilbert Ryle formulates the fatalist argument as 'whatever is was to be, so it can not be helped'. He trys to search out the fallacy of the argument from antecendent truth to the ineviatability of what happens. Ryle contrasts the fatalist conclusion with a posterior truth, that is, for everything that happens it is true for ever afterwards that it happened, and finds the reason why the latter does not worry us, but the former does. According to Ryle, when we think a predecessor makes its successor necessary, we unwittingly assimilate the necessitation to 'causal necessitation'. Moreover the truth of 'a might-have- been prophecy' is not 'an antecedent truth', but 'a posterior truth', as the adjectives as 'deceased', 'lamented' and 'extinct' can be applied to people or mastodons only after they have ceased to exist. In point of fact, we have not the Book of Destiny which has been written up in full from the beginning of time, but a chronicle which is waiting to be filled with facts that happened.