Time travel

Aims

The course is an overview of the topic of time travel in philosophy. It has two main goals. First, by appealing to the case study of time travel, the course aims to provide students with an understanding of the various conceptions of time in contemporary metaphysics (A- vs. B-theory, eternalism, presentism, growing block, branching time, etc.). Second, as the main part of the course focuses on the puzzles that the possibility of time travel raises in connection with notions such as causality, free action, knowledge and information, the course aims to give students the resources to address the following questions: Is there an intrinsic directionality to causal connections? Is ignorance of the future an essential part of free agency? Are all circular explanations per se bad? And so on.

Contents

In the first part of the course (the first four lessons), we will discuss different views and approaches to (i) the ontology and metaphysics of time, (ii) the structure, topology, and directionality of time, and (iii) temporal persistence and identity over time. In the second part of the course, by exploiting the topic of time travel as a "limiting case", we will consider how those issues relate to the problems of causality, action, and information.

Coursework

The course consists of a series of lectures, alternating with general discussion sessions. Students will be required to submit regular written work during the course. Each week, two compulsory readings will be assigned, i.e. journal articles or extracts from books. Students must submit questions, demonstrating a comprehension of the assigned text(s), to the instructor in advance. Students must also produce a research paper at the end of the course on a topic agreed upon with the instructor.

Reading

A full list of the weekly assigned readings will be provided in the first class. There is no assigned reading for our first meeting, which will be an introductory lecture.

Some of the readings for the course will be drawn from the following sources:

Carroll, John W. (2014) A Time Travel Dialogue, Cambridge: Open Book

Le Poidevin, Robin (2003) Travels in Four Dimensions, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Ney, Alyssa (2014) Metaphysics: An Introduction, London: Routledge

Varzi, Achille (ed. 2005) The Monist, vol. 88, no. 3—Special issue: ‘Time Travel’

Wasserman, Ryan (2017) The Paradoxes of Time Travel, Oxford: Oxford University Press