- New
-
Topics
- All Categories
- Metaphysics and Epistemology
- Value Theory
- Science, Logic, and Mathematics
- Science, Logic, and Mathematics
- Logic and Philosophy of Logic
- Philosophy of Biology
- Philosophy of Cognitive Science
- Philosophy of Computing and Information
- Philosophy of Mathematics
- Philosophy of Physical Science
- Philosophy of Social Science
- Philosophy of Probability
- General Philosophy of Science
- Philosophy of Science, Misc
- History of Western Philosophy
- Philosophical Traditions
- Philosophy, Misc
- Other Academic Areas
- Journals
- Submit material
- More
Time Travel
Edited by Sam Baron (University of Melbourne)
Assistant editor: Brigitte C. G. Everett (University of Sydney)
About this topic
| Summary | The philosophy of time travel involves investigation into the question of the physical, logical and metaphysical possibility of time travel. The topic centres on the fact that time travel scenarios seem physically possible, and yet many counterexamples have been put forward showing that it is not logically possible. The famous grandfather paradox asks whether it is possible for one to travel backwards in time to kill their own grandfather. The problem here is that, while it seems possible to engage in backwards time travel, it also seems impossible to change the past. Standard solutions to the paradox have interesting consequences for issues surrounding free will, as the thought goes that some event would always prevent a time traveller from doing the impossible and changing the past. However, without an explanation as to why a time traveller is prevented from performing certain actions this solution has been thought by some to be untenable. An alternative proposed solution, then, is that time is two-dimensional, and that it is possible to change the past on one of these temporal dimensions. Another, related, topic in the literature is that time travel involves backwards causation and, therefore, causal loops. There are two things at issue here. The first is the dispute between those who think that time travel entails causal loops and those who do not. And the second is the dispute between those who think that time travel does entail causal loops and that this is problematic and those who agree with the entailment but argue that it is not problematic. Additional issues in the time travel literature involve time travel and temporal ontology – i.e., whether or not the past, present and future are necessary for time travel – and time travel and identity over time – i.e., whether or not certain views of the persistence of objects rule out the possibility of the same object having two incompatible properties at the same time (due to a time-traveller encountering their younger self). |
| Key works | Classic works on the grandfather paradox are Lewis 1976 and Horwich 1975. Lewis's solution to the grandfather paradox is defended against Horwich 1975 by Smith 1997 and Dowe 2003. The relationship between the grandfather paradox and free will is discussed in Sider 2002 and Vihvelin 1996. Riggs 1997 argues against the solution to the paradox whereby the time traveller is prevented from performing certain actions is untenable, and Baron 2017 looks at the two-dimensional solution to the paradox. Bernstein 2017 discusses time travel and the movable present. A solution to Einstein's field equations that permits closed time-like curves is given in Gödel 1949. Closed time-like curves are discussed in Dowe 2007. The compatibility between dynamic theories of time and time travel is discussed in Monton 2003, Miller 2005, Miller 2006, Miller 2006, Dowe 2009 and Sider 2005. Miller 2021 looks at time travel and future-bias. |
| Introductions | Luminet 2011, and Le Poidevin 2003 both offer good introductions to the topic. |
Show all references
Related
Siblings
- Persistence (1,610 | 384)
- Physics of Time (811)
- Temporal Experience (918 | 321)
- Temporal Logic (499)
- Temporal Expressions (463)
- The Direction of Time (347)
- Aspects of Time, Misc (255)
Contents
472+ found
Order:
| 1 — 50 / 472 |
- Potentials of Future-Viewing Machines.Aaron M. Feeney - manuscript{June 2018 UPDATE: This work has been greatly surpassed by "Utilizing Future-Viewing Instruments" which will appear in the July 2018 issue of Progress in Physics. It can now be downloaded in PDF form from their website.} -/- The introduction of new scientific instruments has always played a vital role in the advancement of science and society. All scientific instruments to date have only been able to gain information pertaining to events of our immediate and distant past. Concerning our attempts to (...)
- Lewis and the Price of Time Travel: Lessons from Großvater.Huw Price - manuscriptResponding to Lewis’s (1976) defense of the consistency of time travel (TT), Horwich (1987) and Price (1996) claim that TT may nevertheless be shown to be improbable, due to its need for unlikely coincidences. Smith (1997, 2024) and Ismael (2003) reply, correctly, that this begs the question against TT. Where does this leave us, and TT itself? To put the issue in a broader frame, I note (i) a Lewis-inspired “defense” of Aristotelian mechanics against a famous argument by Galileo; and (...)
- Time Travel and Intergalactic Travel.Nicholas Schroeder - manuscriptAn existential threat to humanity is that we might never be able to travel intergalactically and will eventually go extinct from some inevitable disaster in our own galaxy. In the short paper, dressed as a type of constructive dilemma, I argue that we can use stationary time travel into the far past as a means of intergalactic travel. I also consider non-stationary time travel into the past, but conclude this type of time travel is extremely limited. The means for intergalactic (...)
- La causalité dans le voyage dans le temps.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscriptCertains scientifiques et philosophes sont d’avis que toute théorie permettant un voyage dans le temps introduirait des problèmes de causalité. Ces types de paradoxes temporels peuvent être évités grâce au principe de cohérence de Novikov ou à une variation de l'interprétation des mondes multiples avec des mondes en interaction. L'argument classique contre la causalité rétrograde est l'argument du contournement. La causalité implique un avenir ontologiquement fermé - une position métaphysique sur le temps communément appelée l'éternalisme, une forme spécifique de non-présentisme. (...)
- Grandfather paradox in time travel.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscriptThe most well-known example of the impossibility of traveling in time is the grandfather paradox or self-infanticide argument: a person who travels in the past and kills his own grandfather, thus preventing the existence of one of his parents and thus his own existence. A philosophical response to this paradox would be the impossibility of changing the past, like Novikov self-consistency principle (if an event exists that would cause a paradox or any "change" to the past whatsoever, then the probability (...)
- Voyage dans le temps.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscriptUne autre définition du voyage dans le temps (Arntzenius 2006) (Smeenk and Wüthrich 2011) l'assimile à l'existence des courbes temporelles fermées, une variété lorentzienne d'une particule matérielle dans l'espace-temps qui revient à son point de départ. Certains auteurs acceptent l’existence de deux dimensions temporelles et d’autres envisagent des scénarios comportant plusieurs univers « parallèles », chacun ayant son propre espace-temps à quatre dimensions.Mais la question est de savoir si un voyage dans une autre dimension temporelle ou dans un autre univers (...)
- Filosofia călătoriei în timp – Paradoxul bunicului.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscriptNewton a susținut ideea timpului absolut, spre deosebire de Leibniz pentru care timpul este doar o relație între evenimente și nu poate fi exprimat în mod independent, afirmație în concordanță ci relativitatea spațiu-timpului. Eternismul susține că trecutul și viitorul există într-un sens real, mergându-se până la ideea că timpul este o dimensiune similară cu dimensiunile spațiale, că evenimentele viitoare și trecute sunt "prezente" pe axa timpului, dar această opinie este contestată. Cel mai cunoscut exemplu de imposibilitate a călătoriei în timp (...)
- Time Travel.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscriptTime travel is a recognized concept in philosophy and science, but whose scope is highly disputed, giving rise to numerous paradoxes in both philosophy and science. Time travel is considered by some accepted both in general relativity and quantum mechanics, but there is a unanimous consensus that it is not feasible with current technology. (Hawkins 2010) The raised issues are different for the time travel in the past compared to the time travel in the future.
- Space, time, and time travel.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscriptNewton supported the idea of absolute time, unlike Leibniz, for which time is only a relation between events and cannot be expressed independently, a statement in concordance with the relativity of space-time. Eternalism claims that the past and the future exist in a real sense, going to the idea that time is a dimension similar to spatial dimensions, that future and past events are "present" on the axis of time, but this view is challenged. On four-dimensional vision, the universe is (...)
- (1 other version)Călătoria în timp.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscriptCălătoria în timp implică deplasarea într-un timp diferit de cel prezent, în trecut sau în viitor, în principiu fără o deplasare în spațiu cu referire la un sistem de coordonate local. Călătoria în timp poate fi făcută de un corp material care poate fi sau nu o ființă vie, și pentru care se folosește de obicei un dispozitiv special denumit mașina timpului. Călătoria în timp este un concept recunoscut în filosofie și știință, dar a cărui posibilitatea este foarte disputată, dând (...)
- Paradoxe du grand-père.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscriptL'exemple le plus connu de l'impossibilité de voyager dans le temps est le paradoxe du grand-père ou l'argument de l'auto-infanticide: une personne qui voyage dans le passé et tue son propre grand-père, empêchant ainsi l'existence d'un de ses parents et donc sa propre existence. Une réponse philosophique à ce paradoxe serait l'impossibilité de changer le passé, (à l'instar du principe de cohérence de Novikov. Le paradoxe du grand-père implique toute action qui change le passé. Il se présente sous de nombreuses (...)
- Paradoxuri cauzale în călătoria în timp.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscriptOrice teorie care ar permite călătoria în timp ar introduce probleme de cauzalitate. Aceste tipuri de paradoxuri temporale pot fi evitate prin principiul de consecvență Novikov sau printr-o variație a interpretării multor lumi cu lumi care interacționează. Argumentul clasic împotriva cauzalității înapoi este argumentul bilking, Dacă un eveniment A provoacă un eveniment anterior B, bilking recomandă o încercare de a decorela A și B, adică de a aduce A în cazurile în care B nu a avut loc și de a (...)
- La philosophie du voyage dans le temps.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscriptL'éternalisme soutient que le passé et le futur existent réellement, en partant de l’idée que le temps est une dimension similaire aux dimensions spatiales, que les événements passés et futurs sont « présents » sur l’axe du temps, mais cette opinion est contestée. Dans la vision à quatre dimensions, l'univers est une topologie espace-temps existante, contenant tout ce qui s'est passé, tout ce qui se passe et tout ce qui va se passer. Il en résulte qu'il n'y a aucun moment (...)
- Boucles causales dans le voyage dans le temps.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscriptÀ propos de la possibilité de voyager dans le temps sur la base de plusieurs ouvrages spécialisés, notamment ceux de Nicholas J. J. Smith (« Time Travel »), William Grey (« Troubles with Time Travel »), Ulrich Meyer (« Explaining causal loops »), Simon Keller and Michael Nelson (« Presentists should believe in time-travel »), Frank Arntzenius and Tim Maudlin (« Time Travel and Modern Physics »), et David Lewis (« The Paradoxes of Time Travel »). L'article commence par une (...)
- Time Machine as Existential Risk.Alexey Turchin - manuscriptDoes the potential creation of a time machine present an existential risk to our current timeline? Time travel is theoretically possible under general relativity, and there is steady progress (similar to Moore's Law) in developing ideas about how to create time machines with decreasing effort. While time travel may seem like a remote possibility due to its dependence on space travel to black holes, there is a concept of a quantum time machine (suggested by Deutsch in 1991 and further developed (...)
- Back to the Future: Curing Past Sufferings and S-Risks via Indexical Uncertainty.Alexey Turchin - manuscriptThe long unbearable sufferings in the past and agonies experienced in some future timelines in which a malevolent AI could torture people for some idiosyncratic reasons (s-risks) is a significant moral problem. Such events either already happened or will happen in causally disconnected regions of the multiverse and thus it seems unlikely that we can do anything about it. However, at least one pure theoretic way to cure past sufferings exists. If we assume that there is no stable substrate of (...)
- The Apparent Nature of Relative Simultaneity.Andrew Wutke - manuscriptThis paper presents the proof of the apparent nature of relative simultaneity originally derived from Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (STR). The proof does not challenge the validity of the STR but uncovers fundamental and widespread error in understanding of practical implications of Lorentz transformations. It is demonstrated that more than a century long debates generally miss the point. This results in counterintuitive claims of coexisting multiple time realities by mere equivalence of equal clock indications and simultaneity. Such claims have (...)
- Self visitation, traveler time and non-contradiction.John Carroll - manuscriptThe self-visitation paradox is one paradox of time travel. As Ted Sider puts it, “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). So as not to beg any questions, let us label what is sitting B and what is standing C. The worry is about how B can be C in light of the looming contradiction that this (...)Remove from this listExport citationBookmark
- Context, conditionals, fatalism, freedom & time travel.John Carroll - manuscript
- A trip back in time and space.George Johnson - manuscriptScience Times cover story, July 10, 2007.
- The Paradoxes of Time Travel.Ken Perszyk & Nicholas J. J. Smith - unknown - In Ken Perszyk & Nicholas J. J. Smith, Public lecture at Te Papa (National Museum of New Zealand).Humans have long been fascinated by the idea of visiting the past and of seeing what the future will bring. Time travel has been one of the most popular themes of science fiction. Most people have seen the TV series ‘Dr Who’ or ‘Quantum Leap’ or ‘Star Trek’. You’ve probably seen one of the ‘Back to the Future’ or ‘Terminator’ movies, or ‘Twelve Monkeys’. Time travel narratives provide fascinating plots, which exercise our imaginations in ever so many ways. But is (...)Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct downloadExport citationBookmark 358 citations
- Driving Through The 4th Dimension in 4th Gear.Nikk Effingham - forthcoming - In Joshua Heter & Richard Greene, Back to the Future and Philosophy: This is Heavy! pp. 4-17.This chapter lays out a way to understand the narrative of 'Back to the Future' as being logically possible.
- Mourning a death foretold: memory and mental time travel in anticipatory grief.Christopher Jude McCarroll & Karen Yan - forthcoming - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences:1-19.Grief is a complex emotional experience or process, which is typically felt in response to the death of a loved one, most typically a family member, child, or partner. Yet the way in which grief manifests is much more complex than this. The things we grieve over are multiple and diverse. We may grieve for a former partner after the breakup of a relationship; parents sometimes report experiencing grief when their grown-up children leave the family home. We can also experience (...)
- Time Travel and Knowledge of the Future.Kristie Miller - forthcoming - In Joshua Heter & Richard Greene, Back to the Future and Philosophy: This is Heavy!In Back to the Future II, Doc incapacitates Jennifer when she arrives in 2015, in order to prevent her having too much knowledge of her future. Doc clearly believes that having knowledge of the future, or at least, too much knowledge, is a bad thing. But if it is bad, why is it bad? This chapter explores one reason why Doc might have thought knowing too much about one’s future is bad: namely that it undermines one’s deliberative freedom. This chapter (...)
- Self-Visitation and the Metaphysics of Place, Causation, and Facts.Daniel S. Murphy - forthcoming - Analytic Philosophy.I explore how endurantists are to handle cases of synchronic bi-location, in which a thing bi-locates at a time (such as by time-travel). I argue that endurantists face significant pressure to posit distinct but structurally identical facts (DSIFs), and critique the fragmentalist approach to bi-location in Simon (2018). Both the positive argument and critique are animated by the observation that handling bi-location cases requires perspicuously describing their spatiotemporal and causal structure. Accordingly, the argument proceeds by considering how endurantists are to (...)
- Time Travel May Provide Closure for Autistic Grievances (9th edition).Alexander Ohnemus - forthcoming - Elk Grove: Self-published.Of course we should NOT rely on the unlikelihood that a parallel universe has unlimited resources, especially since paraellel universes mst NOT exist, and many resources are intangible and sentimental. Yet UNLIKELY, but possibly, the parallel universe that our holographic universe derives from, may have unlimited both natural and economic resources. automated gateway process: AI using the gateway process to travel back in time and manifest desires. 1)First program an artificial brain. 2)Have the Artificial brain complete the gateway process. 3)Go (...)
- (1 other version)About time, concisely.Matias Slavov - forthcoming - Metascience:1-4.Adrian Bardon has produced a new version of his historical introduction to the philosophy of time. Originally published in 2013, the second edition of 2024 is partly rewritten and supplemented with a more extensive discussion on our disposition to project the passage of time [...] Although the book’s title emphasizes history, most of the chapters are directed at issues in systematic philosophy of time: the realism/antirealism debate, temporal passage, temporal experience, spacetime, direction, time travel, time and free will, and the (...)
- Great Scott! The Logic of Certain Scientific Discovery.Keith Begley & Aadil Kurji - 2026 - In Joshua Heter & Richard Greene, Back to the Future and Philosophy: Essays on Traveling Through the Space-Time Continuum. Jeffersonville, NC: McFarland & Co.. pp. 231–239.How does science proceed in the strange situation in which scientists receive confirmation of their theories before they have designed their experiments? -/- In the first act of Back to the Future, Doc Brown asks Marty to meet in the parking lot of the Twin Pines Mall at 1:15 a.m., because Doc has made a major breakthrough and requires Marty’s assistance. When Marty arrives, Doc reports that his latest experiment “is the big one, the one I've been waiting for all (...)Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct download (2 more)Export citationBookmark
- Ethical Puzzles of Time Travel.Sara Bernstein - 2026 - In Nina Emery, The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Time. Routledge. pp. 518–527.This paper is dedicated to articulating the ethical puzzles that arise from the possibility of time travel. I divide the puzzles into three different categories: permissibility puzzles, obligation puzzles, and conflicts between past and future selves. In each category, I suggest that ethical problems involving time travel are not as dissimilar to parallel “normal” ethical puzzles as one might think.Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct download (2 more)Export citationBookmark
- Gravitoelectric Mathematics of Unidentified Extraterrestrial Crafts.Deep Bhattacharjee - 2026A report of an unidentified craft becomes a scientific object only after witness narrative, sensor state, platform motion, weather, optics, radar geometry, infrared response, and the proposed field mechanism are placed in a common mathematical ledger. This paper builds that ledger for disc, sphere, triangle, cigar, toroidal, luminous, trans-medium, and apparent-hover reports. It studies Brown--Biefeld force claims, Tesla discharge narratives, Searl-type annuli, Podkletnov-style impulse claims, alien-reproduction-vehicle diagrams, warp-metric language, wormhole models, time-loop hypotheses, holographic-time proposals, M-theoretic dimensional language, and public UAP (...)
- Time Travel.Nikk Effingham - 2026 - In Nina Emery, The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Time. Routledge. pp. 270-279.This chapter is an introduction to the philosophy of time travel.
- Back to the Future and Philosophy: Essays on Traveling Through the Space-Time Continuum.Joshua Heter & Richard Greene (eds.) - 2026 - Jeffersonville, NC: McFarland & Co..
- Time in Fiction.Hannah H. Kim - 2026 - In Nina Emery, The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Time. Routledge. pp. 508–517.Considering questions at the intersection of time and fiction deepens our understanding of fiction, introduces new questions for philosophy of time, and brings analytic philosophy in discussion with narratology. Philosophers debate whether fictional time can be tensed, whether fictional time can branch, repeat, pause, rewind, or skip and whether fictional time travel is possible. Much of the way we answer these questions will depend on our overall commitment to the nature of fiction. It’s also unclear what, if anything, we can (...)Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct download (2 more)Export citationBookmark 1 citation
- Philosophical Manuscripts, by David Lewis, edited by Frederique Janssen-Lauret and Fraser MacBride. [REVIEW]Daniel Nolan - 2026 - Mind 135 (1):244-250.Review of David Lewis's Philosophical Manuscripts, edited by Frederique Janssen-Lauret and Fraser MacBride.
- Inaugurated Eschatology: A Time Travel Story.Joshua Sijuwade - 2026 - Synesis 18 (2):1-33.This article aims to provide an explication of an influential conceptualisation of the Christian notion of ‘inaugurated eschatology’. This influential conception of eschatology has been proposed by N.T. Wright; however, an intelligibility issue is identified here, which needs to be addressed if this conception is to be affirmed. Hence, a philosophical model of this conception is formulated through the utilisation of the temporal ontology of Priority Presentism introduced by Sam Baron and a specific interpretation of the Moving Objective Present model (...)
- On Lewis’s Way Out.Nicholas J. J. Smith - 2026 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 33 (2):182-195.On the 50th anniversary of the publication of Lewis 1976, this paper re-examines ‘Lewis’s solution to the grandfather paradox’: both the philosophical move often designated using this phrase and the accuracy of this manner of designating that move.
- On Forward Time Travel.Jingkai Liang - 2025 - Res Philosophica 102 (1):87-93.Stretched-out streaks are time travelers who travel to the future at an abnormal rate, whereas broken streaks are those who travel to the future instantaneously. In this article, I argue that cryosleep and revival are the paradigms of these two types of forward time travel, respectively.
- Rotating Universes.Montgomery Link - 2025 - In Raffaele Pisano, A History of Physics: Phenomena, Ideas and Mechanisms: Essays in Honor of Salvo D'Agostino. Cham: Springer Verlag. pp. 161-183.This paper concerns the dispute about spaceSpace, timeTime, and motion, about whether space, time, and motion are absolute or relative. This paper focuses on one aspect of the dispute by investigating a kind of motion, the rotationRotation of galaxies with respect to the inertialInertial frame. In rotating universesRotating Universe, distant galaxies rotate with respect to the inertial frameInertial Frame. Our universe does not rotate. Nonetheless, rotating universesRotating Universe throw light on our own, or so this paper argues. First, the paper (...)
- Backward Causation in Two-Dimensional Time.Yuxuan Zhang - 2025 - Tsinghua Studies in Western Philosophy 11 (2):157-177.Lewis (1979) proposed a set of weight criteria in natural language for assessing the comparative similarity between possible worlds. These criteria rely on the temporal asymmetry of overdetermination and explain why causation is generally forward. Although Lewis himself claimed that his theory does not a priori rule out backward causation, he did not explain how such compatibility is possible beyond offering a few trivial cases and vague remarks. The main tasks of this paper are threefold. First, by formally reconstructing the (...)
- 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 (...)
- Philosophy of Time: The Basics.Graeme Forbes - 2024 - New York, NY: Routledge.What is time? Does it pass? Is the future open? Why do we care? Philosophy of Time: The Basics doesn’t answer these questions. It does give you an opinionated introduction to thinking a bit more deeply about them. Written in a way that assumes no philosophical background from its readers, this book looks at central topics in philosophy of time and shows how they relate to other time-related topics – from theoretical physics (without the maths!) to your own mortality. Additional (...)
- Decision and foreknowledge.J. Dmitri Gallow - 2024 - Noûs 58 (1):77-105.My topic is how to make decisions when you possess foreknowledge of the consequences of your choice. Many have thought that these kinds of decisions pose a distinctive and novel problem for causal decision theory (CDT). My thesis is that foreknowledge poses no new problems for CDT. Some of the purported problems are not problems. Others are problems, but they are not problems for CDT. Rather, they are problems for our theories of subjunctive supposition. Others are problems, but they are (...)
- Doing for circular time what Shoemaker did for time without change: How one could have evidence that time is circular rather than linear and infinitely repeating.Cody Gilmore & Brian Kierland - 2024 - Philosophies 9 (4):92.There are possible worlds in which time is circular and finite in duration, forming a loop of, say, 12,000 years. There are also possible worlds in which time is linear and infinite in both directions and in which history is repetitive, consisting of infinitely many 12,000-year epochs, each two of which are exactly alike with respect to all intrinsic, purely qualitative properties. Could one ever have empirical evidence that one inhabits a world of the first kind rather than a world (...)
- Mental Time Travel in Animals: The “When” of Mental Time Travel.Andrew J. Latham, Kristie Miller & Rasmus Pedersen - 2024 - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 379 (1913).While many aspects of cognition have been shown to be shared between humans and non-human animals, there remains controversy regarding whether the capacity to mentally time travel is a uniquely human one. In this paper, we argue that there are four ways of representing when some event happened: four kinds of temporal representation. Distinguishing these four kinds of temporal representation has five benefits. First, it puts us in a position to determine the particular benefits these distinct temporal representations afford an (...)
- Meaning, Metalepsis, Time-Travel.Glenn Mackin - 2024 - Res Philosophica 101 (2):299-322.This article explores how people can come to experience constitutional conversations as meaningful. To this end, I reinterpret Habermas’s account of deliberative constitutionalism. For Habermas, constitutional discourses are not only rational procedures of opinion- and will-formation, but also sites at which a “world” gets generated. Deliberative politics, therefore, involves unruly and uncontrollable efforts to solicit others into the roles, orientations, and principles of constitutional practices. The result is a novel account of the relationship between constitutional procedures and the “anarchistic” politics (...)
- The Future of the Present.Ulrich Meyer - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89:463-478.Some theories of time entail that the present can change before or after it has happened. Examples include views on which time-travelers can change the past, the glowing block theory, Peter Geach’s mutable future view, and the moving spotlight theory. This paper argues that such ante factum or posthumous change requires a heterodox “split time” view on which earlier-than is not the converse of later-than.
- 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 (...)
- Mental time-travel, semantic flexibility, and A.I. ethics.Marcus Arvan - 2023 - AI and Society 38 (6):2577-2596.This article argues that existing approaches to programming ethical AI fail to resolve a serious moral-semantic trilemma, generating interpretations of ethical requirements that are either too semantically strict, too semantically flexible, or overly unpredictable. This paper then illustrates the trilemma utilizing a recently proposed ‘general ethical dilemma analyzer,’ GenEth. Finally, it uses empirical evidence to argue that human beings resolve the semantic trilemma using general cognitive and motivational processes involving ‘mental time-travel,’ whereby we simulate different possible pasts and futures. I (...)
- A Long Time Ago? Time and Time Travel in Star Wars.Philipp Berghofer - 2023 - In Jason T. Eberl & Kevin S. Decker, Star Wars and Philosophy Strikes Back. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 99–107.This chapter introduces time travel into the Star Wars lore. Time travel stories in which the past is changed are in danger of being inconsistent or plagued by paradoxes. In famous time travel stories such as Back to the Future, the protagonist travels to the past, changes the past, and then returns to a present quite different from the one they left. In contemporary philosophy of time, there are three main approaches to this question: presentism, eternalism, and the growing block (...)
- An inexplicably good argument for causal finitism.Ibrahim Dagher - 2023 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 94 (2):199-211.Causal finitism, the view that the causal history of any event must be finite, has garnered much philosophical interest recently—especially because of its applicability to the Kalām cosmological argument. The most prominent argument for causal finitism is the Grim Reaper argument, which attempts to show that, if infinite causal histories are possible, then other paradoxical states of affairs must also be possible. However, this style of argument has been criticized on the grounds of (i) relying on controversial modal principles, and (...)
| 1 — 50 / 472 |
Try MATCHA Writer if you're interested in citing directly from PhilPapers and certifying your authorship.
This site uses cookies and Google Analytics (see our terms & conditions for details regarding the privacy implications). Use of this site is subject to terms & conditions.
All rights reserved by The PhilPapers Foundation