Critical Notice: The Open Future: Why future contingents are all false By Patrick Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xi + 212.)

Patrick Todd's The Open Future defends the view that all future contingent statements, like ‘It will rain tomorrow’, are false.1 Not only is ‘It will rain tomorrow’ false, but also is ‘It will not rain tomorrow’. It is Todd's contention that the falsity of all future contingents provides the best account of the openness of the future.

Todd thinks that the best account of the open future is one according to which no actual future exists. In Chapter 2, he rejects alternative metaphysical accounts of the future in which there is a determinate way the future will go, yet we are ignorant about how it will go, and in which there is exactly one actual future, but it is in some sense indeterminate which among many possible futures it is. Todd argues that the most plausible account of openness is given by an account according to which ‘there is no “actual future history” in the first place’ (p. 22).