The future, and what might have been

We show that five important elements of the ‘nomological package’— laws, counterfactuals, chances, dispositions, and counterfactuals—needn’t be a problem for the Growing-Block view. We begin with the framework given in Briggsand Forbes (in The real truth about the unreal future. Oxford studies in metaphysics. Oxford University Press, Oxford,2012), and, taking laws as primitive, we show that the Growing-Block view has the resources to provide an account of possibility, and a natural semantics for non-backtracking causal counterfactuals. We show how objective chances might ground a more fine-grained concept of feasibility, and furnished a places in the structure where causation and dispositions might fit. The Growing-Block view, thus understood, provides the resources to explain the close link between modality and tense, so that it predicts modal change as time passes.This account lets us capture not only what the future might hold for us, and also what might have been

Introduction to Special Issue on 'Actual Causation'

An actual cause of some token effect is itself a (distinct) token event (or fact, or state of affairs, …) that helped to bring about that effect. The notion of an actual cause is different from that of a potential cause – for example a pre-empted backup – which had the capacity to bring about the effect, but which wasn't in fact operative on the occasion in question. Sometimes actual causes are also distinguished from mere background conditions: as when we judge that the struck match was a cause of the fire, while the presence of oxygen was merely part of the relevant background against which the struck match operated. Actual causation is also to be distinguished from type causation: actual causation holds between token events in a particular, concrete scenario; type causation, by contrast, holds between event kinds in scenario kinds

Multicultural neoliberalism, global textiles, and the making of the indebted female entrepreneur in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane

Against the promise of happiness associated with the lures of diaspora, this chapter suggests that a consideration of the genre and form of contemporary novels such as Monica Ali’s Brick Lane can help to illuminate the ways in which late liberal discourses of multiculturalism (Povinelli 2011) are increasingly subordinated to the economic norms and values of neoliberalism. Rather than reading the narrative as a story of social mobility through transnational mobility, the chapter considers how Brick Lane inadvertently normalizes homeworking and the entrepreneurial as the horizon of freedom and assimilation for its protagonist in contemporary neoliberal British society. In so doing, it considers how the novel raises wider questions about the ways in which neoliberal discourses of self-management, personal responsibility, and the entrepreneurial cut across the gendered international division of labour between the core and the periphery