The Metaphysical Possibility of Time Travel Fictions

Erkenntnis 88 (3):1309-1329 (2021)
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Abstract

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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Nikk Effingham
University of Birmingham

Citations of this work

Exterminous Hypertime.Nikk Effingham - 2021 - Philosophies 6 (4):85.

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References found in this work

Philosophical papers.David Kellogg Lewis - 1983 - New York: Oxford University Press.
The Paradoxes of Time Travel.David K. Lewis - 1976 - American Philosophical Quarterly 13 (2):145-152.
It ain’t necessarily so.Hilary Putnam - 1962 - Journal of Philosophy 59 (22):658-671.
The Paradoxes of Time Travel.David Lewis - 2004 - In Tim Crane & Katalin Farkas (eds.), Metaphysics: a guide and anthology. New York: Oxford University Press.

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