Analytical Research on the Ontological Status of the Future

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：Aiming at the clarification of the ontological status of the future, I tackled the problems, such as the nature of causation, the uniformity of nature, the status of natural laws, and others. First，through examining theabsence causation, I inquired into the nature of causation. The causation between event-individuals tacitly presupposes the relations between event-types. Effects depend on not only causes but also background conditions. To know what an event is already includes to know its relations to other event-types. To sum up, causation is the order (i.e. the relations between event-types) which the world and the humans jointly make up. Secondly, I grappled with the uniformity of nature, which has been expected to justify the induction. The uniformity concerning the future is essential to the possibility of knowledge. But inferring the uniformity of the future futures from that of the past futures is a circular reasoning and at any time there is a chance that the future will not be uniform. In short, the future is known in one sense but completely unknown in another sense. Thirdly, in the course of the progress of my research, new topics have appeared: the existence of the mind and the emergence of analytic metaphysics. The mind is the subject which projects into the future the knowledge gained through the past experiences and which intends its own future acts. I examined Descartes' argument that tries to make the mind independent of the body, and I showed it is invalid. Analytic metaphysics is a field where many philosophers are working. But in the early twentieth century metaphysics was severely criticized by logical positivists and ordinary language philosophers. I investigated what had caused this change. And lastly, I researched the category theory, which includes the analysis of natural laws and disposition