معرفی
Patrick Todd is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Riverside in 2011. From September 2022 to September 2024, he was on leave from Edinburgh and served as a Senior Research Fellow in the Lund Gothenburg Responsibility Project at Lund University in Sweden.
Dr. Todd's primary research interests focus on metaphysics, ethics, free will, moral responsibility, and philosophy of religion. His work centers on the open future doctrine, moral responsibility theories, and the relationship between divine foreknowledge and human freedom. He has developed a distinctive position arguing that all claims about undetermined aspects of the future are simply false, which he defended in his 2021 book The Open Future: Why Future Contingents Are All False published by Oxford University Press. His research often engages with P.F. Strawson's work on responsibility and examines questions about the moral standing to blame.
His recent publications demonstrate a consistent focus on the intersection of temporal logic, metaphysical indeterminacy, and moral responsibility. The majority of his work examines either the open future doctrine and its implications or various aspects of moral responsibility, particularly questions about who has standing to blame. His 2025 article 'Future contingents, openness and the possibility of omniscience' continues his defense of the open future position against relativist and supervaluationist alternatives, while his 2024 paper 'Let's See You Do Better' develops an account of the norm that one must be better than another to appropriately criticize them.
As a Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Todd contributes to the philosophy department's teaching and research mission. His work has generated significant scholarly engagement, as evidenced by multiple book symposia on his 2021 monograph. While specific details about his teaching responsibilities and grant funding are not provided in the available information, his extensive publication record indicates an active research program in analytic philosophy.
