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VUILLEMIN, Jules. Necessity or Contingency: The Master Argument. CSLI Lecture Notes, no. 56. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 1996. xiii + 289 pp. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $22.95-In antiquity, the dialectician Diodorus Cronus (4th-3d century s.C.) gained reknown as the author of the Master Argument. Unfortunately, this celebrated argument is known to us only as a trio of premises reported by Epictetus (Discourses 2.19):
(A) Every past truth is necessary.
(B) The impossible does not follow from the possible.
(C) There is something possible which neither is nor will be true.
Epictetus says that Diodorus demonstrated the set of premises to be inconsistent, then maintained that the high cost of denying either A or B argued for the elimination of C. We know from other sources that the denial of C agreed with Diodorus' own definition of the possible as "what either is or will be." This restriction of the possible to the sooneror-later actual was taken in antiquity to imply the denial of any real contingency in things-on the familiar grounds that what certainly will be is bound to happen. Hence, Diodorus' Master Argument was regarded as a proxy argument for determinism.
The dearth of evidence regarding the details of the Master Argument has...