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  1. Time Travel and the Open Future.Kristie Miller - 2005 - Disputatio 1 (19):223 - 232.
    In this paper, I argue that the thesis that time travel is logically possible, is inconsistent with the necessary truth of any of the usual ‘open futureobjective present’ models of the universe. It has been relatively uncontroversial until recently to hold that presentism is inconsistent with the possibility of time travel. I argue that recent arguments to the contrary do not show that presentism is consistent with time travel. Moreover, the necessary truth of other open future-objective present models which we (...)
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  • Back to the Present: Defending Presentist Time Travel.Paul Richard Daniels - 2012 - Disputatio 4 (33):469 - 484.
    Here I defend the compatibility of presentism and time travel against a few objections. Keller and Nelson argue that, if presentism is at all plausible, presentism and time travel are as compatible as eternalism and time travel. But Miller and Sider are not convinced. I reply that for their concerns to have merit, Miller and Sider must assume presentists are committed to positions they need not be; I explain why presentists are not so committed and, in the process, defend Keller (...)
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  • Yet Another Confusion About Time Travel.Giuliano Torrengo - 2013 - Disputatio 5 (35):49-56.
    I argue that, contrary to an idea to be found in popularizations of time travel, one cannot more easily multiply oneself by taking younger versions of oneself back in time than by travelling back in time on one’s own. The reason is that the suggested multiplication of the traveller is, from a global perspective, only apparent.
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  • Hilbert's Inferno: Time Travel for the Damned.Alasdair M. Richmond - 2013 - Ratio 26 (3):233-249.
    Combining time travel with certain kinds of supertask, this paper proposes a novel model for Hell. Temporally-closed spacetimes allow otherwise impossible opportunities for material kinds of damnation and reveal surprising limitations on metaphysical objections to Hell. Prima facie, eternal damnation requires either infinite amounts of time or time for the damned to speed-up arbitrarily. However, spatiotemporally finite ‘time travel’ universes can host unending personal torment for infinitely many physical beings, while keeping fixed finite limits on rates of temporal passage. Such (...)
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  • Death and Eternal Recurrence.Lars Bergström - 2013 - In Fred Feldman Ben Bradley (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death. Oxford University Press.
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  • From Experience to Metaphysics: On Experience‐based Intuitions and their Role in Metaphysics.Jiri Benovsky - 2015 - Noûs 49 (3):684-697.
    Metaphysical theories are often counter-intuitive. But they also often are strongly supported and motivated by intuitions. One way or another, the link between intuitions and metaphysics is a strong and important one, and there is hardly any metaphysical discussion where intuitions do not play a crucial role. In this article, I will be interested in a particular kind of such intuitions, namely those that come, at least partly, from experience. There seems to be a route from experience to metaphysics, and (...)
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  • The Eternal Return of the Same: Nietzsche's "Valueless" Revaluation of All Values.David Rowe - 2012 - Parrhesia 15:71-86.
    In this paper I argue that Nietzsche should be understood as a “thorough-going nihilist”. Rather than broaching two general projects of destroying current values and constructing new ones, I argue that Nietzsche should be understood only as a destroyer of values. I do this by looking at Nietzsche’s views on nihilism and the role played by Nietzsche’s cyclical view of time, or his doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same. I provide a typology of nihilisms, as they are found (...)
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  • Feasibility Constraints for Political Theories.Holly Lawford-Smith - 2010 - Dissertation, Australian National University
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  • What time travelers cannot not do (but are responsible for anyway).Joshua Spencer - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 166 (1):149-162.
    The Principle of Alternative Possibilities is the intuitive idea that someone is morally responsible for an action only if she could have done otherwise. Harry Frankfurt has famously presented putative counterexamples to this intuitive principle. In this paper, I formulate a simple version of the Principle of Alternative Possibilities that invokes a course-grained notion of actions. After warming up with a Frankfurt-Style Counterexample to this principle, I introduce a new kind of counterexample based on the possibility of time travel. At (...)
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  • Time, Truth, Actuality, and Causation: On the Impossibility of Divine Foreknowledge.Michael Tooley - 2010 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 2 (1):143 - 163.
    In this essay, my goal is, first, to describe the most important contemporary philosophical approaches to the nature of time, and then, secondly, to discuss the ways in which those different accounts bear upon the question of the possibility of divine foreknowledge. I shall argue that different accounts of the nature of time give rise to different objections to the idea of divine foreknowledge, but that, in addition, there is a general argument for the impossibility of divine foreknowledge that is (...)
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  • Events and times: a case study in means-ends metaphysics.Christopher Hitchcock - 2012 - Philosophical Studies 160 (1):79-96.
    There is a tradition, tracing back to Kant, of recasting metaphysical questions as questions about the utility of a conceptual scheme, linguistic framework, or methodological rule for achieving some particular end. Following in this tradition, I propose a ‘means-ends metaphysics ’, in which one rigorously demonstrates the suitability of some conceptual framework for achieving a specified goal. I illustrate this approach using a debate about the nature of events. Specifically, the question is whether the time at which an event occurs (...)
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  • The causal efficiency of the passage of time.Jiri Benovsky - 2012 - Philosophia 40 (4):763-769.
    Does mere passage of time have causal powers ? Are properties like "being n days past" causally efficient ? A pervasive intuition among metaphysicians seems to be that they don't. Events and/or objects change, and they cause or are caused by other events and/or objects; but one does not see how just the mere passage of time could cause any difference in the world. In this paper, I shall discuss a case where it seems that mere passage of time does (...)
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  • Time Travel and Time Machines.Douglas Kutach - 2013 - In Adrian Bardon & Heather Dyke (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Time. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 301–314.
    Thinking about time travel is an entertaining way to explore how to understand time and its location in the broad conceptual landscape that includes causation, fate, action, possibility, experience, and reality. It is uncontroversial that time travel towards the future exists, and time travel to the past is generally recognized as permitted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, though no one knows yet whether nature truly allows it. Coherent time travel stories have added flair to traditional debates over the metaphysical (...)
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  • What Are Centered Worlds?Shen-yi Liao - 2012 - Philosophical Quarterly 62 (247):294-316.
    David Lewis argues that centered worlds give us a way to capture de se, or self-locating, contents in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. In recent years, centered worlds have also gained other uses in areas ranging widely from metaphysics to ethics. In this paper, I raise a problem for centered worlds and discuss the costs and benefits of different solutions. My investigation into the nature of centered worlds brings out potentially problematic implicit commitments of the theories that employ (...)
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  • Dissociative Identity: An Objection to Baker’s Constitution Theory.Edward Andrew Greetis - 2011 - Acta Analytica 26 (4):329-341.
    One of the central problems of personal identity is to determine what we are essentially . In response to this problem, Lynne Rudder Baker espouses a psychological criterion, that is, she claims that persons are essentially psychological. Baker’s theory purports to bypass the problems of other psychological theories such as Dissociative Identity Disorder and the problem of individuating persons synchronically. I argue that the theory’s treatment of Dissociative Identity Disorder leads to untenable results, is invalid, and consequently fails to individuate (...)
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  • Why There Cannot be Any Such Thing as “Time Travel”.Rupert Read - 2011 - Philosophical Investigations 35 (2):138-153.
    Extending work of Wittgenstein, Lakoff and Johnson I suggest that it is the metaphors we rely on in order to conceptualise time that provide an illusory space for time-travel-talk. For example, in the “Moving Time” spatialisation of time, “objects” move past the agent from the future to the past. The objects all move in the same direction – this is mapped to time always moving in the same direction. But then it is easy to imagine suspending this rule, and asking (...)
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  • Travelling in A- and B- Time.Theodore Sider - 2005 - The Monist 88 (3):329-335.
    Some say that presentism precludes time travel into the past since it implies that the past does not exist, but this is a bad argument. Presentism says that only currently existing entities exist, and that the only properties and relations those entities instantiate are those that they currently instantiate. This does in a sense imply that the past does not exist. But if that precluded time travel into the past, it would also preclude the one-second-per-second “time travel” into the future (...)
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  • Honors 229F The Problem of Time: Puzzles about Time in Philosophy, Literature, and Film TuTh 11-12:15.Tydings Hall - unknown
    In this course we will examine several philosophical puzzles concerning time. We all seem to experience time in a very fundamental and direct way. Yet once we begin to reflect on what time really is, it is easy to feel as puzzled as St Augustine was, who wrote: “If no one asks me, I know what [time] is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know.” The first set of issues we will discuss (...)
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  • Epistemic Modals in Context.Andy Egan, John Hawthorne & Brian Weatherson - 2005 - In Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Contextualism in philosophy: knowledge, meaning, and truth. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 131-170.
    A very simple contextualist treatment of a sentence containing an epistemic modal, e.g. a might be F, is that it is true iff for all the contextually salient community knows, a is F. It is widely agreed that the simple theory will not work in some cases, but the counterexamples produced so far seem amenable to a more complicated contextualist theory. We argue, however, that no contextualist theory can capture the evaluations speakers naturally make of sentences containing epistemic modals. If (...)
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  • No Time Travel for Presentists.Steven D. Hales - 2010 - Logos and Episteme 1 (2):353-360.
    In the present paper, I offer a new argument to show that presentism about time is incompatible with time travel. Time travel requires leaving the present, which, under presentism, contains all of reality. Therefore to leave the present moment is to leave reality entirely; i.e. to go out of existence. Presentist “time travel” is therefore best seen as a form of suicide, not as a mode of transportation. Eternalists about time do not face the same difficulty, and time travel is (...)
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  • A Puzzle About Responsibility: A Problem and its Contextualist Solution.Peter Baumann - 2011 - Erkenntnis 74 (2):207-224.
    This paper presents a puzzle about moral responsibility. The problem is based upon the indeterminacy of relevant reference classes as applied to action. After discussing and rejecting a very tempting response I propose moral contextualism instead, that is, the idea that the truth value of judgments of the form S is morally responsible for x depends on and varies with the context of the attributor who makes that judgment. Even if this reply should not do all the expected work it (...)
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  • Counterfactuals all the way down?: Marc Lange: Laws and lawmakers: Science, metaphysics, and the laws of nature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, 280 pp, $99 HB, $24.95 PB.Jim Woodward, Barry Loewer, John W. Carroll & Marc Lange - 2011 - Metascience 20 (1):27-52.
    Counterfactuals all the way down? Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9437-9 Authors Jim Woodward, History and Philosophy of Science, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA Barry Loewer, Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA John W. Carroll, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8103, USA Marc Lange, Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, CB#3125—Caldwell Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3125, USA Journal Metascience Online (...)
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  • Critical Notice of Theodore Sider, Four Dimensionalism.Matthew Davidson - 2004 - Philosophical Books 45 (1):17-33.
    This is a critical notice of Theodore Sider's book, _Four-Dimensionalism_.
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  • Time travel, parahistory and the past artefact dilemma.Alasdair Richmond - 2010 - Philosophy 85 (3):369-373.
    In 1987, Roy Sorensen coined the term 'parahistory' to denote the study of genuinely anachronistic artefacts delivered by time travel.¹ 'Parahistory' would thus stand to history rather as parapsychology is claimed to stand to psychology, i.e. the parahistorian would study historical data that were obtained through channels that orthodox science does not recognise. How might one establish credentials as a time traveller? What sort of evidence could a time-traveller point to in support of claims that would presumably command a great (...)
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  • Self Visitation, Traveler Time, and Compatible Properties.John W. Carroll - 2011 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 41 (3):359-370.
    Ted Sider aptly and concisely states the self-visitation paradox thus: 'Suppose I travel back in time and stand in a room with my sitting 10-year-old self. I seem to be both sitting and standing, but how can that be?' (2001, 101). I will explore a relativist resolution of this paradox offered by, or on behalf of, endurantists.1 It maintains that the sitting and the standing are relative to the personal time or proper time of the time traveler and is intended (...)
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  • Attention and perceptual content.Bence Nanay - 2010 - Analysis 70 (2):263-270.
    I argue that perceptual content is always affected by the allocation of one’s attention. Perception attributes determinable and determinate properties to the perceived scene. Attention makes (or tries to make) our perceptual attribution of properties more determinate. Hence, a change in our attention changes the determinacy of the properties attributed to the perceived scene.
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  • Closure on knowability.Mark Jago - 2010 - Analysis 70 (4):648-659.
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  • A compatibilist-friendly rejection of prepunishment.Michael Robinson - 2010 - Philosophia 38 (3):589-594.
    In a series of recent papers, Saul Smilansky has argued that compatibilists have no principled way of resisting the view that prepunishment is at least sometimes appropriate, thus revealing compatibilism to be a radical position, out of keeping with our ordinary moral judgments. Recent attempts to resist this conclusion seem to have overlooked the biggest problem with Smilansky’s argument, which is this: Smilanksy argues that the most obvious objection to prepunishment—namely, that it is inappropriate because it involves punishing the innocent (...)
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  • Dispositions, Abilities to Act, and Free Will: The New Dispositionalism.Randolph Clarke - 2009 - Mind 118 (470):323-351.
    This paper examines recent attempts to revive a classic compatibilist position on free will, according to which having an ability to perform a certain action is having a certain disposition. Since having unmanifested dispositions is compatible with determinism, having unexercised abilities to act, it is held, is likewise compatible. Here it is argued that although there is a kind of capacity to act possession of which is a matter of having a disposition, the new dispositionalism leaves unresolved the main points (...)
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  • Fission, cohabitation and the concern for future survival.Rebecca Roache - 2010 - Analysis 70 (2):256-263.
    (No abstract is available for this citation).
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  • Deterministic Chance.Antony Eagle - 2010 - Noûs 45 (2):269 - 299.
    I sketch a new constraint on chance, which connects chance ascriptions closely with ascriptions of ability, and more specifically with 'CAN'-claims. This connection between chance and ability has some claim to be a platitude; moreover, it exposes the debate over deterministic chance to the extensive literature on (in)compatibilism about free will. The upshot is that a prima facie case for the tenability of deterministic chance can be made. But the main thrust of the paper is to draw attention to the (...)
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  • Coinciding Objects and Duration Properties: Reply to Eagle.Cody Gilmore - 2009 - In Dean Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics: Volume 5. Oxford University Press UK. pp. 95-111.
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  • Can I kill my younger self? Time travel and the retrosuicide paradox.Peter B. M. Vranas - 2009 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 90 (4):520-534.
    If time travel is possible, presumably so is my shooting my younger self ; then apparently I can kill him – I can commit retrosuicide. But if I were to kill him I would not exist to shoot him, so how can I kill him? The standard solution to this paradox understands ability as compossibility with the relevant facts and points to an equivocation about which facts are relevant: my killing YS is compossible with his proximity but not with his (...)
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  • What time travelers may be able to do.Peter B. M. Vranas - 2010 - Philosophical Studies 150 (1):115 - 121.
    Kadri Vihvelin, in "What time travelers cannot do" (Philos Stud 81: 315-330, 1996), argued that "no time traveler can kill the baby who in fact is her younger self, because (V1) "if someone would fail to do something, no matter how hard or how many times she tried, then she cannot do it", and (V2) if a time traveler tried to kill her baby self, she would always fail. Theodore Sider (Philos Stud 110: 115-138, 2002) criticized Vihvelin's argument, and Ira (...)
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  • Location and perdurance.Antony Eagle - 2009 - In Dean Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics: Volume 5. Oxford University Press UK. pp. 53-94.
    Recently, Cody Gilmore has deployed an ingenious case involving backwards time travel to highlight an apparent conflict between the theory that objects persist by perduring, and the thesis that wholly coincident objects are impossible. However, careful attention to the concepts of location and parthood that Gilmore’s cases involve shows that the perdurantist faces no genuine objection from these cases, and that the perdurantist has a number of plausible and dialectically appropriate ways to avoid the supposed conflict.
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  • Constraints on data in worlds with closed timelike curves.Phil Dowe - 2007 - Philosophy of Science 74 (5):724–735.
    It is claimed that unacceptable constraints on initial data are imposed by certain responses to paradoxes that threaten time travel, closed timelike curves (CTCs) and other backwards causation hypotheses. In this paper I argue against the following claims: to say “contradictions are impossible so something must prevent the paradox” commits in general to constraints on initial data, that for fixed point dynamics so-called grey state solutions explain why contradictions do not arise, and the latter have been proved to avoid constraints (...)
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  • Arguments for incompatibilism.Kadri Vihvelin - 2003/2017 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Determinism is a claim about the laws of nature: very roughly, it is the claim that everything that happens is determined by antecedent conditions together with the natural laws. Incompatibilism is a philosophical thesis about the relevance of determinism to free will: that the truth of determinism rules out the existence of free will. The incompatibilist believes that if determinism turned out to be true, it would also be true that we don't have, and have never had, free will. The (...)
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  • Backward causation.Jan Faye - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Sometimes also called retro causation. A common feature of our world seems to be that in all cases of causation, the cause and the effect are placed in time so that the cause precedes its effect temporally. Our normal understanding of causation assumes this feature to such a degree that we intuitively have great difficulty imagining things differently. The notion of backward causation, however, stands for the idea that the temporal order of cause and effect is a mere contingent feature (...)
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  • Time travel, coinciding objects, and persistence.Cody Gilmore - 2007 - In Dean Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics:Volume 3: Volume 3. Oxford University Press UK. pp. 177-198.
    Existing puzzles about coinciding objects can be divided into two types, corresponding to the manner in which they bear upon the endurantism v. perdurantism debate. Puzzles of the first type, which involve temporary spatial co-location, can be solved simply by abandoning endurantism in favor of perdurantism, whereas those of the second type, which involve career-long spatial co-location, remain equally puzzling on both views. I show that the possibility of backward time travel would give rise to a new type of puzzle. (...)
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  • Knowability and the capacity to know.Michael Fara - 2010 - Synthese 173 (1):53 - 73.
    This paper presents a generalized form of Fitch's paradox of knowability, with the aim of showing that the questions it raises are not peculiar to the topics of knowledge, belief, or other epistemic notions. Drawing lessons from the generalization, the paper offers a solution to Fitch's paradox that exploits an understanding of modal talk about what could be known in terms of capacities to know. It is argued that, in rare cases, one might have the capacity to know that p (...)
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  • Time travel without causal loops.Bradley Monton - 2009 - Philosophical Quarterly 59 (234):54-67.
    It has sometimes been suggested that backwards time travel always incurs causal loops. I show that this is mistaken, by describing worlds where backwards time travel occurs and yet no causal loops occur. Arguments that backwards time travel can occur without causal loops have been given before in the literature, but I show that those arguments are unconvincing.
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  • Replies to Gallois, Hirsch and Markosian. [REVIEW]Theodore Sider - 2004 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (3):674–687.
    I thank my commentators for their kind words, and for their close reading and challenging criticisms of my book. I have chosen selective and substantive replies. Those criticisms I ignore, I ignore because I have little more to say, not because they are unworthy of discussion.
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  • Time travel, coincidences, and counterfactuals.Theodore Sider - 2002 - Philosophical Studies 110 (2):115 - 138.
    In no possible world does a time traveler succeed in killing herearlier self before she ever enters a time machine. So if many,many time travelers went back in time trying to kill theirunprotected former selves, the time travelers would fail inmany strange, coincidental ways, slipping on bananapeels, killing the wrong victim, and so on. Such cases producedoubts about time travel. How could ``coincidences'' beguaranteed to happen? And wouldn't the certainty of coincidentalfailure imply that time travelers are not free to killtheir (...)
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  • Presentists can believe in closed timelike curves.Bradley Monton - 2003 - Analysis 63 (3):199–202.
    It is often thought that presentism is incompatible with time travel. I will argue that this common view is incorrect. Specifically, I will argue that presentism is compatible with some stories that involve closed timelike curves, and that some of these stories are time-travel stories.
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  • The twins’ paradox and temporal passage.Kristie Miller - 2004 - Analysis 64 (3):203–206.
    In a recent paper in this journal, McCall and Lowe (2003) argue that an understanding of Special Relativity reveals that the A theorist’s notion of temporal passage is consistent with the B theory of time. They arrive at this conclusion by considering the twins’ paradox, where one of two twins (T) travels to Alpha Centauri and back and upon her return has aged 30 years, while her earth-bound twin (S) has aged 40 years. This paper argues that their account of (...)
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  • Some counterexamples to causal decision theory.Andy Egan - 2007 - Philosophical Review 116 (1):93-114.
    Many philosophers (myself included) have been converted to causal decision theory by something like the following line of argument: Evidential decision theory endorses irrational courses of action in a range of examples, and endorses “an irrational policy of managing the news”. These are fatal problems for evidential decision theory. Causal decision theory delivers the right results in the troublesome examples, and does not endorse this kind of irrational news-managing. So we should give up evidential decision theory, and be causal decision (...)
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  • General relativity and the conceivability of time travel.Robert Weingard - 1979 - Philosophy of Science 46 (2):328-332.
    It has been suggested by several philosophers that many of the so-called paradoxes of backward time travel can be resolved if we conceive of the backward time traveller as having a zig-zag or N-shaped world line in spacetime. In this I am in general agreement. But there is still a problem in conceiving of backward time travel this way. In this note I will show how we can solve this problem by conceiving of backward time travel in terms of the (...)
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  • Bananas enough for time travel.Nicholas J. J. Smith - 1997 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (3):363-389.
    This paper argues that the most famous objection to backward time travel can carry no weight. In its classic form, the objection is that backward time travel entails the occurrence of impossible things, such as auto-infanticide—and hence is itself impossible. David Lewis has rebutted the classic version of the objection: auto-infanticide is prevented by coincidences, such as time travellers slipping on banana peels as they attempt to murder their younger selves. I focus on Paul Horwich‘s more recent version of the (...)
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  • A survival guide to fission.Mark Moyer - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 141 (3):299 - 322.
    The fission of a person involves what common sense describes as a single person surviving as two distinct people. Thus, say most metaphysicians, this paradox shows us that common sense is inconsistent with the transitivity of identity. Lewis’s theory of overlapping persons, buttressed with tensed identity, gives us one way to reconcile the common sense claims. Lewis’s account, however, implausibly says that reference to a person about to undergo fission is ambiguous. A better way to reconcile the claims of common (...)
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  • No end in sight: Causal loops in philosophy, physics and fiction.Richard Hanley - 2004 - Synthese 141 (1):123 - 152.
    There have been many objections to the possibility oftime travel. But all the truly interesting ones concern the possibility of reversecausation. What is objectionable about reverse causation? I diagnose that the trulyinteresting objections are to a further possibility: that of causal loops. I raisedoubts about whether there must be causal loops if reverse causation obtains; but devote themajority of the paper to describing, and dispelling concerns about, various kinds ofcausal loop. In short, I argue that they are neither logically nor (...)
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