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What time travelers cannot do

Philosophical Studies 81 (2-3):315 - 330 (1996)

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  1. Things mere mortals can do, but philosophers can’t.Stephanie Rennick - 2015 - Analysis 75 (1):22-26.
    David Lewis famously argued that the time traveller ‘can’ murder her grandfather, even though she never will: it is compossible with a particular set of facts including her motive, opportunity and skill . I argue that while ordinary agents ‘can’ under Lewis’s conception, philosophers cannot – the latter will not only fail to fulfill their homicidal intentions but also fail to form them in the first place.
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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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  • (1 other version)Time.Ned Markosian - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Discussions of the nature of time, and of various issues related to time, have always featured prominently in philosophy, but they have been especially important since the beginning of the 20th Century. This article contains a brief overview of some of the main topics in the philosophy of time — Fatalism; Reductionism and Platonism with respect to time; the topology of time; McTaggart's arguments; The A Theory and The B Theory; Presentism, Eternalism, and The Growing Universe Theory; time travel; and (...)
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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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  • 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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  • 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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  • Banana peels and time travel.G. C. Goddu - 2007 - Dialectica 61 (4):559–572.
    A world in which time travel into the past occurred would seem like a most strange world. Nicholas Smith, however, in his ‘Bananas Enough for Time Travel’, argues that time travel is not so strange as we think. In particular, he argues against what he views as the main reason time travel worlds seem so strange – the claim that time travel entails unusual numbers of coincidences. I shall argue that Smith's argument for rejecting the claim is inadequate. Hence, the (...)
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  • Time travel: Double your fun.Frank Arntzenius - 2006 - Philosophy Compass 1 (6):599–616.
    I start off by relating the standard philosophical account of what time travel is to models of time travel that have recently been discussed by physicists. I then discuss some puzzles associated with time travel. I conclude that philosophers’ arguments against time travel are relevant when assessing the likelihood of the occurrence time travel in our world, and are relevant to the assessment whether time travel is physically possible.
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  • Theism and Secular Modality.Noah Gordon - 2023 - Dissertation, University of Southern California
    I examine issues in the philosophy of religion at the intersection of what possibilities there are and what a God, as classically conceived in the theistic philosophical tradition, would be able to do. The discussion is centered around arguing for an incompatibility between theism and two principles about possibility and ability, and exploring what theists should say about these incompatibilities. -/- I argue that theism entails that certain kinds and amounts of evil are impossible. This puts theism in conflict with (...)
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  • Back to the Present: How Not to Use Counterfactuals to Explain Causal Asymmetry.Alison Fernandes - 2022 - Philosophies 7 (2):43.
    A plausible thought is that we should evaluate counterfactuals in the actual world by holding the present ‘fixed’; the state of the counterfactual world at the time of the antecedent, outside the area of the antecedent, is required to match that of the actual world. When used to evaluate counterfactuals in the actual world, this requirement may produce reasonable results. However, the requirement is deeply problematic when used in the context of explaining causal asymmetry. The requirement plays a crucial role (...)
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  • Dependence and the Freedom to Do Otherwise.Taylor Cyr - forthcoming - Faith and Philosophy.
    An increasingly popular approach to reconciling divine foreknowledge with human freedom is to say that, because God’s beliefs depend on what we do, we are free to do otherwise than what we actually do despite God’s infallible foreknowledge. This paper develops a new challenge for this dependence response. The challenge stems from a case of backward time travel in which an agent intuitively lacks the freedom to do otherwise because of the time-traveler’s knowledge of what the agent will do, and (...)
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  • Lessons from Grandfather.Andrew Law & Ryan Wasserman - 2022 - Philosophies 7 (1):11.
    Assume that, even with a time machine, Tim does not have the ability to travel to the past and kill Grandfather. Why would that be? And what are the implications for traditional debates about freedom? We argue that there are at least two satisfactory explanations for why Tim cannot kill Grandfather. First, if an agent’s behavior at time _t_ is causally dependent on fact _F_, then the agent cannot perform an action (at _t_) that would require _F_ to have not (...)
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  • What Time Travel Teaches Us about Moral Responsibility.Taylor Cyr & Neal Tognazzini - 2024 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 26 (3).
    This paper explores what the metaphysics of time travel might teach us about moral responsibility. We take our cue from a recent paper by Yishai Cohen, who argues that if time travel is metaphysically possible, then one of the most influential theories of moral responsibility (i.e., Fischer and Ravizza’s) is false. We argue that Cohen’s argument is unsound but that Cohen’s argument can serve as a lens to bring reasons-responsive theories of moral responsibility into sharper focus, helping us to better (...)
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  • Maybe Some Other Time.Martin Glazier - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):197-212.
    I develop a puzzle, the resolution of which, I argue, requires an unfamiliar distinction between two forms or senses of metaphysical modality, each bearing a different relationship to time. In one sense of ‘metaphysically possible’, it is metaphysically possible for it to be a time other than the time it is now; in another sense, this is not metaphysically possible.
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  • Killing Time Again.Kadri Vihvelin - 2020 - The Monist 103 (3):312-327.
    I have argued that even if time travel is metaphysically possible, there are some things a time traveler would not be able to do. I reply here to critics who have argued that my account entails fatalism about the past or entails that the time traveler is unfree or that she is bound by “strange shackles.” My argument does not entail any sort of fatalism. The time traveler is able to do many of the things that everyone else can do (...)
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  • A Corpus Study of "Know": On the Verification of Philosophers' Frequency Claims about Language.Nat Hansen, J. D. Porter & Kathryn Francis - 2019 - Episteme 18 (2):242-268.
    We investigate claims about the frequency of "know" made by philosophers. Our investigation has several overlapping aims. First, we aim to show what is required to confirm or disconfirm philosophers’ claims about the comparative frequency of different uses of philosophically interesting expressions. Second, we aim to show how using linguistic corpora as tools for investigating meaning is a productive methodology, in the sense that it yields discoveries about the use of language that philosophers would have overlooked if they remained in (...)
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  • Time travel and counterfactual asymmetry.Alison Fernandes - 2021 - Synthese 198 (3):1983-2001.
    We standardly evaluate counterfactuals and abilities in temporally asymmetric terms—by keeping the past fixed and holding the future open. Only future events depend counterfactually on what happens now. Past events do not. Conversely, past events are relevant to what abilities one has now in a way that future events are not. Lewis, Sider and others continue to evaluate counterfactuals and abilities in temporally asymmetric terms, even in cases of backwards time travel. I’ll argue that we need more temporally neutral methods. (...)
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  • How Stable Is Objective Chance?John Cusbert - 2022 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 73 (3):613-629.
    This paper examines the stability of objective chance. I defend the stable chance thesis : that in any given possible world, any pair of intrinsic duplicate physical setups with the same chances of being subject to the same external influences must yield the same chances. I argue that SCT compares favourably to rivals in the literature. I then consider a challenge to SCT involving time travel and causal loops. I argue that SCT survives this challenge, but that such cases expose (...)
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  • Unable to Do the Impossible.Anthony Nguyen - 2020 - Mind 129 (514):585-602.
    Jack Spencer has recently argued for the striking thesis that, possibly, an agent is able to do the impossible—that is, perform an action that is metaphysically impossible for that person to perform. Spencer bases his argument on (Simple G), a case in which it is impossible for an agent G to perform some action but, according to Spencer, G is still intuitively able to perform that action. I reply that we would have to give up at least four action-theoretical principles (...)
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  • Avoiding Paradoxes in Multiverse Time Travel Narratives.Morgan Luck - 2017 - Science Fiction 2 (1).
    The aim of this paper is to help authors construct coherent time-travel narratives by establishing five features of multiverse time travel. To this end, multiverse time travel will be contrasted to fixed-universe time travel, and both versions related to various cases - where each case is designed to illustrate a key feature of multiverse time travel.
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  • Able to Do the Impossible.Jack Spencer - 2017 - Mind 126 (502):466-497.
    According to a widely held principle—the poss-ability principle—an agent, S, is able to only if it is metaphysically possible for S to. I argue against the poss-ability principle by developing a novel class of counterexamples. I then argue that the consequences of rejecting the poss-ability principle are interesting and far-reaching.
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  • Tim, Tom, Time and Fate: Lewis on Time Travel.Brian Garrett - 2016 - Analytic Philosophy 57 (3):247-252.
    In his well-known time travel story, David Lewis claims that there is a sense in which Tim can go back in time and kill his Grandfather and a (more inclusive) sense in which he cannot. Lewis describes Tim’s predicament as semi-fatalist, but holds that this does not compromise Tim’s freedom or his ability to kill Grandfather. I argue that if semi-fatalism is true of Tim, it is true of everyone, and that this is a troubling conclusion.
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  • Ways to Commit Autoinfanticide.John W. Carroll - 2016 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 2 (1):180--191.
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  • Free Will and Time Travel.Neal A. Tognazzini - 2016 - In Kevin Timpe, Meghan Griffith & Neil Levy (eds.), Routledge Companion to Free Will. New York: Routledge. pp. 680-690.
    In this chapter I articulate the threat that time travel to the past allegedly poses to the free will of the time traveler, and I argue that on the traditional way of thinking about free will, the incompatibilist about time travel and free will wins the day. However, a residual worry about the incompatibilist view points the way toward a novel way of thinking about free will, one that I tentatively explore toward the end of the chapter.
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  • Location and Mereology.Cody Gilmore, Claudio Calosi & Damiano Costa - 2013 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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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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  • Should we allow for the possibility of necessarily unexercised abilities? A new route to rejecting the poss-ability principle.Björn Lundgren - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Most analyses of can and abilities accept what is known as the poss-ability principle (i.e. that an agent S is able to Φ only if it is possible for S to Φ). In this paper, I devise a new route to rejecting the poss-ability principle. I argue that the poss-ability principle is incompatible with some kind of agent, such as God; that the poss-ability principle has normatively unacceptable consequences (granted the existence of a certain kind of evil agent); and that (...)
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  • The Dynamic Theory of Time and Time Travel to the Past.Ned Markosian - 2020 - Disputatio 12 (57):137-165.
    I argue that time travel to the past is impossible, given a certain metaphysical theory, namely, The Dynamic Theory of Time. I first spell out my particular way of capturing the difference between The Dynamic Theory of Time and its rival, The Static Theory of Time. Next I offer four different arguments for the conclusion that The Dynamic Theory is inconsistent with the possibility of time travel to the past. Then I argue that, even if I am wrong about this, (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Independence Solution to the Problem of Theological Fatalism.Ryan Wasserman - 2022 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (1):66-77.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
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  • Time travel and coincidence-free local dynamical theories.Giuliano Torrengo - 2020 - Synthese (11):4835-4846.
    I criticize Lockwood’s solution to the “paradoxes” of time travel, thus endorsing Lewis’s more conservative position. Lockwood argues that only in the context of a 5D space-time-actuality manifold is the possibility of time travel compatible with the Autonomy Principle (according to which global constraints cannot override what is physically possible locally). I argue that shifting from 4D space-time to 5D space-time-actuality does not change the situation with respect to the Autonomy Principle, since the shift does not allow us to have (...)
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  • Notes on the Grandfather Paradox.Bradford Skow - manuscript
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  • (1 other version)Time Travel: Probability and Impossibility By Nikk Effingham.Alasdair Richmond - 2020 - Analysis 80 (4):837-839.
    Time Travel: Probability and Impossibility By EffinghamNikkOxford University Press, 2020. 256 pp.
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  • What Tim Can and Cannot Do: A Paradox of Time Travel Revisited.Romy Jaster - 2020 - Kriterion - Journal of Philosophy 34 (4):93-112.
    Time travel, it has been argued, leads to paradoxes, and in particular to a problem known as the grandfather paradox. Lewis has famously argued for the now standard view that the grandfather paradox is merely apparent. But underlying Lewis's solution is a faulty account of ability statements – one, according to which ability statements express possibility statements. I argue, contrary to Vihvelin and others, that an ameliorated view of ability statements allows for the same treatment of the seeming paradox. Hence, (...)
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  • Ability and the Past.Bokai Yao - 2019 - American Philosophical Quarterly 56 (4):397-406.
    Two principles regarding agents' specific ability are proposed. The first claims that ordinary agents always lack the ability to do otherwise in the past, while the second principle observes that it is at least possible for some agent to have the ability to perform some action in the past. These two principles further give rise to three desiderata for a true account of ability. Two accounts of ability in the literature—the conditional analysis and the dispositional account—are then examined but they (...)
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  • Freedom, self-prediction, and the possibility of time travel.Alison Fernandes - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (1):89-108.
    Do time travellers retain their normal freedom and abilities when they travel back in time? Lewis, Horwich and Sider argue that they do. Time-travelling Tim can kill his young grandfather, his younger self, or whomever else he pleases—and so, it seems can reasonably deliberate about whether to do these things. He might not succeed. But he is still just as free as a non-time traveller. I’ll disagree. The freedom of time travellers is limited by a rational constraint. Tim can’t reasonably (...)
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  • Time Travel, Freedom, and Incompatibilism.Ryan Wasserman - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (8):2953-2966.
    This is a paper about time travel and what it teaches us about freedom. I argue that cases of time travel bring out an important difference between two ways of thinking about “the past”—either in terms of time itself, or in terms of causation. This ambiguity naturally transfers over to our talk about things like fixity, determinism, and incompatibilism. Moreover, certain cases of time travel suggest that our freedom is not constrained by the temporal past _per se_, but by our (...)
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  • Bulletproof Grandfathers, David Lewis, and ‘Can’t’-Judgements.Brian Garrett - 2019 - Acta Analytica 34 (2):177-180.
    In this discussion piece, I argue that David Lewis fails to support his claim that time-travelling Tim cannot kill his Grandfather in 1921. This result, in turn, undermines Lewis’s contextualist solution to the Grandfather Paradox—i.e. conceding that Tim can and cannot kill Grandfather, but relative to different contexts in each case.
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  • Time Travelers (and Everyone Else) Cannot Do Otherwise.G. C. Goddu - 2024 - Philosophies 9 (1):28.
    Many defenders of the possibility of time travel into the past also hold that such time travel places no restrictions on what said time travelers can do. Some hold that it places at least a few restrictions on what time travelers can do. In attempting to resolve this dispute, I reached a contrary conclusion. Time travelers to the past cannot do other than what they in fact do. Using a very weak notion of can, I shall argue that the correspondingly (...)
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  • Abilities, freedom, and inputs: a time traveller's tale.Olivia Coombes - 2023 - Dissertation, University of Edinburgh
    The philosophy of time travel is a sub-field of metaphysics – the study of what there is and what things are like – that considers questions about the possibility of time travel and what a world in which time travel is possible looks like. These questions range from whether time travel is actually possible, to how time travellers can act in the past or future. This thesis delves into a particularly interesting, yet historically undertreated theme: the abilities of time travellers (...)
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  • Autoinfanticide Is No Biggie: The Reinstatement Reply to Vihvelin.Richard Mark Hanley - 2021 - Philosophies 6 (4):87.
    David Lewis’s attempt to defuse grandfather paradoxes consistently without special restrictions on the ability of time travelers to act in the past is controversial. Kadri Vihvelin uses the case of possible autoinfanticide—killing one’s infant self—to argue on Lewisian grounds that Lewis is wrong, since all counterfactual attempts at autoinfanticide would fail. I present a new defense of Lewis against Vihvelin premised on the possibility of personal _reinstatement_, where a person who dies prematurely is replicated from information collected from a previous (...)
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  • Killing Baby Suzy.Ira Kiourti - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 139 (3):343-352.
    In her (1996) Kadri Vihvelin argues that autoinfanticide is nomologically impossible and so that there is no sense in which time travelers are able to commit it. In response, Theodore Sider (2002) defends the original Lewisian verdict (Lewis 1976) whereby, on a common understanding of ability, time travelers are able to kill their earlier selves and their failure to do so is merely coincidental. This paper constitutes a critical note on arguments put forward by both Sider and Vihvelin. I argue (...)
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  • Presentists Should Not Believe in Time Travel.Takeshi Sakon - 2021 - Kagaku Tetsugaku 53 (2):191-213.
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  • (1 other version)Time Travel: Probability and Impossibility By Nikk Effingham. [REVIEW]Alasdair Richmond - 2021 - Analysis 80 (4):837-839.
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  • Good and bad arithmetical manners.Lloyd Reinhardt - 2015 - Analysis 75 (1):26-28.
    Frege's scathing comments on Mill on the empirical grounds of arithmetical truth are elaborated. The suggestion is made that some entities are ‘well-behaved' : if you perform two acts and then two more, the ‘result' will be that exactly four acts have occurred. How much it all matters or means is not further discussed.
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  • (1 other version)The Independence Solution to the Problem of Theological Fatalism.Ryan Wasserman - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 104 (1):66-77.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 1, Page 66-77, January 2022.
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  • Lewis and Taylor as Partners in Sin.James Van Cleve - 2019 - Acta Analytica 34 (2):165-175.
    David Lewis’s analysis of “can” in “The Paradoxes of Time Travel” has been widely accepted both as a definitive analysis of “can” and as a successful resolution of the Grandfather Paradox for time travel. I argue that the central feature of his analysis puts it on all fours with a fallacy frequently imputed to fatalists such as Richard Taylor. I go on to consider two moves that might be made to avoid the fallacy, arguing that one of them leads to (...)
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