Metaphysics > Time > Aspects of Time > Time Travel

Time Travel

Edited by Sam Baron (Australian Catholic University)
Assistant editor: B. C. Everett (University of Sydney)
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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 1987 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. 
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416 found
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1 — 50 / 416
  1. 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 (...)
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  2. Space, time, and time travel.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscript
    Newton 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 (...)
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  3. Filosofia călătoriei în timp – Paradoxul bunicului.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscript
    Newton 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 (...)
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  4. Time Travel.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscript
    Time 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.
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  5. Grandfather paradox in time travel.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscript
    The 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 (...)
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  6. Boucles causales dans le voyage dans le temps.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscript
    À 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 (...)
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  7. Voyage dans le temps.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscript
    Une 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 (...)
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  8. La causalité dans le voyage dans le temps.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscript
    Certains 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. (...)
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  9. Buclele cauzale în călătoria în timp.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscript
    În această lucrare analizez posibilitatea călătoriei în timp pe baza mai multor lucrări de specialitate, printre care cele ale lui Nicholas J.J. Smith ("Time Travel", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy”), William Grey (”Troubles with Time Travel”), Ulrich Meyer (”Explaining causal loops”), Simon Keller și Michael Nelson (”Presentists should believe in time-travel”), Frank Arntzenius și Tim Maudlin ("Time Travel and Modern Physics") și David Lewis (“The Paradoxes of Time Travel”). Lucrarea începe cu o Introducere în care fac o scurtă prezentare a (...)
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  10. La philosophie du voyage dans le temps.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscript
    L'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 (...)
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  11. Paradoxuri cauzale în călătoria în timp.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscript
    Orice 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 (...)
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  12. Călătoria în timp.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscript
    Călătoria 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 (...)
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  13. Paradoxe du grand-père.Nicolae Sfetcu - manuscript
    L'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 (...)
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  14. Back to the Future: Curing Past Sufferings and S-Risks via Indexical Uncertainty.Alexey Turchin - manuscript
    The 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 (...)
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  15. The Apparent Nature of Relative Simultaneity.Andrew Wutke - manuscript
    This 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 (...)
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  16. Causal Loops in Time Travel.Nicolae Sfetcu -
    About the possibility of time traveling based on several specialized works, including those of 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"), and David Lewis (“The Paradoxes of Time Travel”). The article begins with an Introduction in which I make a short presentation of the time travel, and continues with a History (...)
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  17. Self visitation, traveler time and non-contradiction.John Carroll - manuscript
    The 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 (...)
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  18. Context, conditionals, fatalism, freedom & time travel.John Carroll - manuscript
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  19. A trip back in time and space.George Johnson - manuscript
    Science Times cover story, July 10, 2007.
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  20. Paradoxes of Time Travel to the Future.Sara Bernstein - forthcoming - In Helen Beebee & Anthony Fisher (eds.), Perspectives on the Philosophy of David K. Lewis. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    This paper brings two fresh perspectives on Lewis’s theory of time travel. First: many key aspects and theoretical desiderata of Lewis’s theory can be captured in a framework that does not commit to eternalism about time. Second: implementing aspects of Lewisian time travel in a non-eternalist framework provides theoretical resources for a better treatment of time travel to the future. While time travel to the past has been extensively analyzed, time travel to the future has been comparatively underexplored. I make (...)
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  21. What Time Travel Teaches Us About Moral Responsibility.Taylor Cyr & Neal Tognazzini - forthcoming - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy.
    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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  22. The Metaphysical Possibility of Time Travel Fictions.Nikk Effingham - forthcoming - Erkenntnis:1-21.
    In some stories, time travellers cannot change the past. It is widely accepted that this is metaphysically possible. In some stories, time travellers can change the past. Many philosophers have explained how that, too, is metaphysically possible. This paper considers narratives where sometimes the past can change and sometimes it cannot, arguing that this is also something that is possible. Further, I argue that we can make sense of stories where some events appear to be ‘fixed points in time’.
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  23. Decision and Foreknowledge.J. Dmitri Gallow - forthcoming - Noûs.
    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 (...)
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  24. Dispositionalism’s (grand)daddy issues: time travelling and perfect masks.Giannini Giacomo & Donatella Donati - forthcoming - Analysis:1-9.
    There is a tension between Dispositionalism –– the view that all metaphysical modality is grounded in actual irreducible dispositional properties –– and the possibility of time travel. This is due to the fact that Dispositionalism makes it much harder to solve a potentiality-based version of the grandfather paradox. We first present a potentiality-based version of the grandfather paradox, stating that the following theses are inconsistent: 1) time travel is possible, 2) powers fully ground modality, 3) self-defeating actions are impossible, 4) (...)
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  25. A Grammar in Two Dimensions: The Temporal Mechanics of Arrival and the Semantics/Pragmatics Divide.A. G. Holdier - forthcoming - Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy.
    Within the philosophy of language, contextualists typically hold (and semantic minimalists deny) that pragmatic elements of an utterance can affect its semantic content. This paper concretizes this debate by analogizing both positions to different kinds of time-travel stories: contextualism is akin to Ludovician narratives that deny the possibility of temporal editing (or “the changing of past events”) while semantic minimalism is aligned with stories that allow the past to be literally altered. By focusing particularly on Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival, (...)
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  26. Time travel and coincidence-free local dynamical theories.Giuliano Torrengo - forthcoming - 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. 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 a coincidence-free local dynamical theory.
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  27. A Strange Proximity: On the Notion of Walten in Derrida and Heidegger in advance.Daniela Vallega-Neu - forthcoming - Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy.
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  28. Superdeterminism: a reappraisal.Giacomo Andreoletti & Louis Vervoort - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-20.
    This paper addresses a particular interpretation of quantum mechanics, i.e. superdeterminism. In short, superdeterminism i) takes the world to be fundamentally deterministic, ii) postulates hidden variables, and iii) contra Bell, saves locality at the cost of violating the principle of statistical independence. Superdeterminism currently enjoys little support in the physics and philosophy communities. Many take it to posit the ubiquitous occurrence of hard-to-digest conspiratorial and coincidental events; others object that violating the principle of statistical independence implies the death of the (...)
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  29. Presentism, Continuous Time-Travel and the Phenomenology of Passage.Sam Baron & David Braddon-Mitchell - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (2):767-786.
    We argue that a certain variety of presentist time travel ends up significantly undermining the motivational foundations which lead some, but not all, presentists to their view. We suggest that if presentism is motivated by phenomenology, and part of that phenomenology is that it’s an experiential datum that we experience temporal passage, then the basis for believing presentism is less secure than we might have thought.
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  30. 7. Being Open As a Form of Negative Theology: On Nominalism, Negative Theology, and Derrida’s Performative Interpretation of Khôra.Ilse N. Bulhof - 2022 - In Ilse Bulhof & Laurens ten Kate (eds.), Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology. Fordham University Press. pp. 195-222.
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  31. Resisting temptation and overcoming procrastination: The roles of mental time travel and metacognition.Erica Cosentino, Christopher Jude McCarroll & Kourken Michaelian - 2022 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 21 (4):791-811.
    We tend to seek immediate gratification at the expense of long-term reward. In fact, the more distant a reward is from the present moment?the more we tend to discount it. This phenomenon is known as temporal discounting. Engaging in mental time travel plausibly enables subjects to overcome temporal discounting, but it is unclear how, exactly, it does so. In this paper, we develop a framework designed to explain the effects of mental time travel on temporal discounting by showing how the (...)
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  32. 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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  33. Condillac and Derrida: Perception, the Human and Empiricism.Sean Gaston - 2022 - Research in Phenomenology 52 (1):1-22.
    In June 2020, a new work by Derrida on Condillac was published, Le Calcul des langues. This article re-examines Derrida’s readings of Condillac, focusing on the relation between perception and the language of signs; the relation between human knowledge and the animal; and the idealization and limits of empiricism.
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  34. Fragmenting Reality: An Essay on Passage, Causality and Time Travel.Samuele Iaquinto & Giuliano Torrengo - 2022 - London: Bloomsbury Academic.
    The growing interest in fragmentalism is one of the most exciting trends in philosophy of time and is gradually reshaping the contemporary debate. Providing an extensive interpretation of this view, Samuele Iaquinto and Giuliano Torrengo articulate a novel theory of the passage of time and argue that it is the most effective in vindicating the inherent dynamism of reality. Iaquinto and Torrengo offer the first full-range application of fragmentalism to a number of metaphysical topics, including the open future, causation, the (...)
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  35. Against the standard solution to the grandfather paradox.Yael Loewenstein - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2).
    1000 time-travelers travel back in time, each with the intention of killing their own infant-self. If there is no branching time, then on pain of bringing about a logical contradiction, all must fail. But this seems inexplicable: what is to ensure that the time-travelers are stopped? For a time, this inexplicability objection was thought to provide evidence that there is something incoherent about the possibility of backwards time travel in a universe without branching time. There is now near-consensus, however, that (...)
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  36. Introduction to Special Issue Time Travel.Alasdair Richmond - 2022 - Philosophies 7 (5):100.
    The philosophy of time travel has an illustrious pedigree, having seen ground-breaking physical and philosophical treatments in the late 1940s and early 1950s from Kurt Gödel [...].
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  37. On Derrida’s Donner le temps, Volumes I & II: A New Engagement with Heidegger.Adam R. Rosenthal - 2022 - Research in Phenomenology 52 (1):23-47.
    This essay explores the importance of Donner le temps II within the context of Derrida’s writings on Heidegger and the gift. In the first section of the essay, I situate the publication of the latter half of Derrida’s 1978–79 seminar against his writings on the gift generally, beginning in 1968 and ending in 2000. In the second section, I explain how the second volume of Donner le temps relates to the first. In the final three sections of the paper, I (...)
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  38. The being-in-the-world of psyche: Derrida’s early reading of Freud.Mauro Senatore - 2022 - Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 13 (2):82-93.
    _Abstract_: In this article, I propose an original re-interpretation of the encounter between deconstruction and psychoanalysis as it is described by Jacques Derrida in his early essay “_Freud and the scene of writing_” (1966). My working hypothesis is that Derrida first reads psychoanalysis as a _partially_ _deconstructive_ human science. To test this hypothesis, I begin by demonstrating that Derrida’s reading draws on the description of deconstructive sciences offered since his early version of_ Grammatology _(1965-66). Second, I explain that it traces (...)
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  39. 8. Crisis in Our Speaking about God: Derrida and Barth's Epistle to the Romans.Rico Sneller - 2022 - In Ilse Bulhof & Laurens ten Kate (eds.), Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology. Fordham University Press. pp. 223-249.
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  40. The future ain’t what it used to be: Strengthening the case for mutable futurism.Giacomo Andreoletti & Giuseppe Spolaore - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):10569-10585.
    This paper explores mutable futurism, the view according to which the future can literally change—that is, it can happen that a future time t changes from containing an event E to lacking it. Mutable futurism has received little attention so far, and the details and implications of the view are underexplored in the literature. For instance, it currently lacks a precise metaphysical model and a formal semantics. Although we do not endorse mutable futurism, our goal here is to strengthen the (...)
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  41. Does Lewis’ Theory of Causation Permit Time Travel?Phil Dowe - 2021 - Philosophies 6 (94):94.
    David Lewis aimed to give an account of causation, and in particular, a semantics for the counterfactuals to which his account appeals, that is compatible with backwards causation and time travel. I will argue that he failed, but not for the reasons that have been offered to date, specifically by Collins, Hall and Paul and by Wasserman. This is significant not the least because Lewis’ theory of causation was the most influential theory over the last quarter of the 20th century; (...)
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  42. Vacillating time: a metaphysics for time travel and Geachianism.Nikk Effingham - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):7159-7180.
    ‘Past vacillators’ believe that what was once the case may change over time. This has obvious applications to the possibility of changing the past via time travel. ‘Future vacillators’ believe that some things will happen and yet, later, will not. Further to issues in time travel, future vacillation has applications when it comes to ‘Geachian’ views about the open future. This paper argues that if you deny that the ‘earlier than’ and ‘later than’ relations are converses of one another then (...)
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  43. 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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  44. A queer pregnancy: affective kinship, time travel and reproductive choice in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival.Heather Latimer - 2021 - Feminist Theory 22 (3):429-442.
    This article engages with both queer theories of temporality and new materialist theories of kinship in order to analyse the reproductive politics of Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival. It does so in order to speculate on what happens to the concept of reproductive choice when time is in a loop. Arrival uses time travel to disrupt the linearity of reproduction by allowing its protagonist, Louise, to see that a future child will die an early, horrible death, yet still having her (...)
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  45. What Time-travel Teaches Us About Future-Bias.Kristie Miller - 2021 - Philosophies 6 (38):38.
    Future-biased individuals systematically prefer positively valenced events to be in the future (positive future-bias) and negatively valenced events to be in the past (negative future-bias). The most extreme form of future-bias is absolute future-bias, whereby we completely discount the value of past events when forming our preferences. Various authors have thought that we are absolutely future-biased (Sullivan (2018:58); Parfit (1984:173) and that future-bias (absolute or otherwise) is at least rationally permissible (Prior (1959), Hare (2007; 2008), Kauppinen (2018), Heathwood (2008)). The (...)
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  46. Multilocation Without Time Travel.Justin Mooney - 2021 - Erkenntnis 86 (6):1431-1444.
    Some philosophers defend the possibility of synchronic multilocation, and have even used it to defend other substantive metaphysical theses. But just how strong is the case for the possibility of synchronic multilocation? The answer to this question depends in part on whether synchronic multilocation is wedded to other controversial metaphysical notions. In this paper, I consider whether the possibility of synchronic multilocation depends on the possibility of time travel, and I conclude that the answer hinges on the nature of time (...)
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  47. Philosophy of Time: A Contemporary Introduction.Sean Enda Power - 2021 - Routledge.
    As a growing area of research, the philosophy of time is increasingly relevant to different areas of philosophy and even other disciplines. This book describes and evaluates the most important debates in philosophy of time, under several subject areas: metaphysics, epistemology, physics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, rationality, and art. -/- Questions this book investigates include: Can we know what time really is? Is time possible, especially given modern physics? Must there be time because we cannot think (...)
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  48. Time-out of time:: a postscript to nuclear time travel.Bernd Schmeikal - 2021 - New York: Nova Science Publishers.
    The reader will be familiarized with some inconspicuous additions to the theory of relativity and quantum theory, which concern the energy density in cosmic and sub-nuclear domains. These are seemingly technical details, but they make the extreme vividness of light and its speed understandable. We will also ask anew some questions that concern that apparently objective world, whose objectivity is not just a matter of self-evidence but is constantly being reconstituted in intelligent awareness. Thus, the vibrancy of the presence of (...)
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  49. Back to the (Branching) Future.Giacomo Andreoletti - 2020 - Acta Analytica 35 (2):181-194.
    The future is different from the past. What is past is fixed and set in stone. The future, on the other hand, is open insofar as it holds numerous possibilities. Branching-tree models of time account for this asymmetry by positing an ontological difference between the past and the future. Given a time t, a unique unified past lies behind t, whereas multiple alternative existing futures lie ahead of t. My goal in this paper is to show that there is an (...)
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  50. Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). [REVIEW]Stefano Bigliardi - 2020 - Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy 3:1-19.
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