Abstract

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 the unavailability of an all-things-considered “can” and the other to a new primitive modality, not analyzable in Lewis’s way.