According to William James, “philosophic study means the habit of always seeing an alternative, of not taking the usual for granted, of making conventionalities fluid again, of imagining foreign states of mind.” Patrick Todd's The Open Future is philosophic study in the Jamesian sense—in spades—and Todd's subject is, appropriately, making metaphysical, semantic, and practical sense of the idea that, sometimes, the future branches into alternate possibilities, a topic at the heart of James's own interests. Because Todd's views are process friendly without quite being in the mold of process thought, his work is a rewarding read with many insights for process thinkers and some improvements on what they (myself included) have argued.
The open future in question is one in which the future is settled by neither deterministic causes that operate in accordance with laws of nature nor by virtue of an actual future history, a “way things are...
