No Time Travel for Presentists

Logos and Episteme 1 (2):353-360 (2010)
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Abstract

In the present paper, I offer a new argument to show that presentism about time is incompatible with time travel. Time travel requires leaving the present, which, under presentism, contains all of reality. Therefore to leave the present moment is to leave reality entirely; i.e. to go out of existence. Presentist “time travel” is therefore best seen as a form of suicide, not as a mode of transportation. Eternalists about time do not face the same difficulty, and time travel is compossible with eternalism.

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20690533

DOI

10.5840/logos-episteme2010129

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Author's Profile

Steven Hales
Bloomsburg University

Citations of this work

Tensed Facts and the Fittingness of our Attitudes 1.Kristie Miller - 2022 - Philosophical Perspectives 36 (1):216-232.

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References found in this work

The Paradoxes of Time Travel.David K. Lewis - 1976 - American Philosophical Quarterly 13 (2):145-152.
A Defense of Presentism.Ned Markosian - 2004 - Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 1:47-82.
A future for presentism.Craig Bourne - 2006 - New York: Oxford University Press.
On What There Is.Willard Van Orman Quine - 1948 - Review of Metaphysics 2 (5):21-38.
Presentism and properties.John Bigelow - 1996 - Philosophical Perspectives 10:35-52.

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