How can we talk meaningfully about the past if it does not exist to be talked about? What gives time its direction? Is time travel possible? This defence of presentism - the view that only the present exists - makes an original contribution to a fast growing and exciting debate.

How can we talk meaningfully about the past if it does not exist to be talked about? What gives time its direction? Is time travel possible? This defence of presentism - the view that only the present exists - makes an original contribution to a fast growing and exciting debate.

Most of us would want to say that it is true that Socrates taught Plato. According to realists about past facts,1 this is made true by the fact that there is, located in the past, i.e., earlier than now, at least one real event that is the teaching of Plato by Socrates. Presentists, however, in denying that past events and facts exist2 cannot appeal to such facts to make their past-tensed statements true. So what is a presentist to do?

What can we learn about the world from engaging with fictional time-series--stories involving time travellers, recurring and rewinding time, and foreknowledge of the future? Do they show us radical alternative possibilities concerning the nature of time, or do they show that even the impossible can be represented in fiction? Neither, so this book argues. Defending the view that a fiction represents a single possible world, the authors show how apparent representations of radically different time-series can be explained in terms of (...) how worlds are represented without there being any fictional world which has such a time-series. In this way, the book uses the complexities of fictional time to get to the core of the relation between truth in fiction and possibility. It provides a logic and metaphysics to deal with the fact that fictions can leave certain features of their fictional worlds indefinite, and draws comparisons and connections between fictional and scientific representations and hypotheses. (shrink)

Most of us would want to say that it is true that Socrates taught Plato. According to realists about past facts, this is made true by the fact that there is, located in the past, i.e., earlier than now, at least one real event that is the teaching of Plato by Socrates. Presentists, however, in denying that past events and facts exist cannot appeal to such facts to make their past-tensed Statements true. So what is a presentist to do?There are (...) at least three conditions that would ideally be met in a satisfactory solution to this problem:a) It must preserve our views about which Statements are true and which falseb) It must be transparent what the truthmakers are for those Statementsc) It must accommodate the truth-value links between various times. (shrink)

Personification has received little philosophical attention, but Daniel Nolan has recently argued that it has important ramifications for the relationship between fictional representation and possibility. Nolan argues that personification involves the representation of metaphysically impossible identities, which is problematic for anyone who denies that fictions can have impossible content. We develop an account of personification which illuminates how personification enhances engagement with fiction, without need of impossible content. Rather than representing an identity, personification is something that is done with representations—a (...) matter of use rather than content—and involves only a comparison of possibilities. We illustrate our account using the personification of death in the film Meet Joe Black, and show that there are no grounds for taking it to be fictionally true that there is a metaphysically impossible identity between Death and death. (shrink)

Some have thought that the process of the expansion of the universe can be used to define an absolute ‘cosmic time’ which then serves as the absolute time required by tensed theories of time. Indeed, this is the very reason why many tense theorists are happy to concede that special relativity is incompatible with the tense thesis, because they think that general relativity, which trumps special relativity, and on which modern cosmology rests, supplies the means of defining temporal becoming using (...) cosmic time. I argue that cosmic time is not up to the task, and that these tense theorists should rethink their strategy in dealing with the theories of relativity. Introduction The Mellor-Rees argument against tense theories Can expansion combat such wrinkles? Event and creation horizons Bursting the balloon. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In his contribution to the second part of this special issue, Storrs McCall criticizes the solution to his puzzle that we put forward in the first part of the issue. In this paper, we expand on our solution and defend it from his objections.

Arthur Prior states that ‘It will be/was/is that p’ is true iff ‘p’ will be/was/is true, and that is all that needs to be said about the matter. This appears to avoid any need to invoke the existence of non-present entities and accounts for tensed truths with very little ontological cost. However, as David Lewis notes, this version of presentism gives the wrong results when applied to numerically quantified tensed propositions. I show how presentism can accommodate numerical quantification by introducing (...) a more appropriate tense operator. Further, I argue that it is implausible to think that we can have a primitive understanding of it; the correct semantics involves quantification over past and future times. I go on to show what kind of ontology can complement this semantic story, whilst remaining presentist in nature. (shrink)

What is it that makes a student's answer correct or incorrect in Religious Studies? In practice, the standards of correctness in the Religious Studies classroom are generally applied with relative ease by teachers and students. Nevertheless, they are problematic. We shall argue that correctness does not come from either the students or the teacher believing that what has been said is true. This raises the question: what is correctness, if it does not come down to truth? We propose, and examine, (...) three rival solutions, each of which, to an extent, rationalises a fairly natural response to the problem. The first, the elliptical approach, says that correct contributions have some tacit content: they are elliptical for true sentences about beliefs. The second, the imaginative approach, seeks to replace appeals to truth and belief with an appeal to imagination, treating Religious Studies as a ‘game of make-believe’ in which teachers and students imaginatively engage with certain worldviews. The third, the institutional approach, locates the root of correctness in the practices of the Religious Studies institution, which include making endorsements of some judgements and not others. We show that the first of our proposed approaches encounters a number of significant objections. We find the second of our proposed approaches to be better, but the third is the most attractive, providing a direct, intuitive and comprehensive route through the problem of correctness. (shrink)

Some fictions seem to involve branching time, where one time series ‘splits’ into two or two time series ‘fuse’ into one. We provide a new framework for thinking about these fictional representations: not as representations of branching time series but rather as branching representations of linear time series. We explain how branching at the level of the representation creates a false impression that the story describes a branching of the time series in the fictional world itself. This involves explaining away (...) the illusion of various causal connections which may at first appear essential to understanding the story as a unified whole. This provides a more accurate account of the relationship between the representation and what is represented, which in turn reveals the extent to which it is legitimate to draw conclusions about actual time from fictional representations. (shrink)

David Lewis introduced the idea of a quasi-miracle to overcome a problem in his initial account of counterfactuals. Here we put the notion of a quasi-miracle to a different and new use, showing that it offers a novel account of the phenomenon of poetic justice, where characters in a narrative get their due by happy accident. The key to understanding poetic justice is to see what makes poetically just events remarkable coincidences. We argue that remarkable coincidence is to be understood (...) in terms of a distinctive type of experience quasi-miracles offer. Cases of poetic justice offer a dual awareness of the accidental nature of the events and of a non-accidental process, involving intention, which it appears would explain them. We also extend this account to incorporate how we might experience magic tricks. An account of poetic justice as quasi-miraculous allows us to account for the experience of encounters with poetic justice, as involving the incongruity of seeing design in accident. (shrink)

We argue that some fictional truths are fictionally true by default. We also argue that these fictional truths are subject to being undermined. We propose that the context within which we are to evaluate what is fictionally true changes when a possibility which was previously ignorable is brought to attention. We argue that these cases support a model of fictional truth which makes the conversational dynamics of determining truth in fiction structurally akin to the conversational dynamics of knowledge-ascription, as this (...) is understood by David Lewis’s contextualist approach to knowledge. We show how a number of the rules which Lewis proposes for the case of knowledge-ascription can be employed to develop a novel and powerful framework for the case of truth in fiction. (shrink)

From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to The Motorcycle Diaries, to be a biker is to be on the road to the meaning of life. What would the existentialists have to say about facing death on a bike? Can your motorcycle be as much a work of art as a Michelangelo painting? And why is it that bikers are so often political rebels? Philosopher and biker Craig Bourne shows for the first time the thoughtful side of the biker, (...) and takes us on a fun trip through the philosophy of motorcycles. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In 'An Insoluble Problem', Storrs McCall presents an argument which he takes to reveal the real problem with backwards time travel. McCall asks us to imagine a scenario in which a renowned artist produces his famous works by copying them from reproductions brought back to him by a time-travelling art critic. The novelty of the scenario lies in its introduction of aesthetic constraints on the possibility of time travel, something which sets it apart from other time travel cases. McCall (...) states that 'The puzzle lies... in finding where artistic creativity enters the equation', and that 'Unlike the traditional "paradoxes of time travel", this problem has no solution'. We offer four responses to McCall's puzzle. Whilst we show that the puzzle is not insoluble, we also argue that it reveals something about the proper relationship between copying and creativity, which may not have been apparent without considering time travel. (shrink)

"Iago's 'I am not what I am' epitomises how Shakespeare's work is rich in philosophy, from issues of deception and moral deviance to those concerning the complex nature of the self, the notions of being and identity, and the possibility or impossibility of self-knowledge and knowledge of others. The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Philosophy examines the following important topics: - What roles can be played in an approach to Shakespeare by drawing on philosophical frameworks and the work of philosophers? (...) - What can philosophical theories of meaning and communication show about the dynamics of Shakespearean interactions, and vice versa? - How are notions such as political and social obligation, justice, equality, love, agency, and the ethics of interpersonal relationships demonstrated in Shakespeare's works? - What do the plays and poems invite us to say about the nature of knowledge, belief, doubt, deception and epistemic responsibility? - How can the ways in which Shakespeare's characters behave illuminate existential issues concerning meaning, absurdity, death and nothingness? - What might Shakespeare's characters and their actions show about the nature of the self, the mind, and the identity of individuals? - How can Shakespeare's works inform philosophical approaches to notions such as beauty, humour, horror and tragedy? - How do Shakespeare's works illuminate philosophical questions about the nature of fiction, the attitudes and expectations involved in engagement with theatre, and the role of acting and actors in creating representations? The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Philosophy is essential reading for students and researchers in aesthetics, philosophy of literature and philosophy of theatre"--. (shrink)

comprehensive moral doctrines, a second (and, if you will, higher) level for justifying the principles for shared political institutions. Finally, it ignores Rawls’s idea of ‘wide public reason’, developed in the second preface to PL (1996), which authorizes citizens to draw on preferred comprehensive doctrines and personal moral convictions in arguments about the constitution and about political policies in cases where there is not a firm agreement in such matters.