"Time travel stories are logically inconsistent"
John Bigelow (Monash University)

April 5, 2012, 5:15pm - 7:15pm
Department of Philosophy, University of Melbourne

Theatre 1
Old Geology, University of Melbourne
Melbourne
Australia

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Abstract:
David Lewis was a passionate believer in a "fourdimensional" metaphysics, in which time is a fourth dimension that is more like the three spatial dimensions than used to be believed. In particular, things distant from us in space exist, and for Lewis things distant from us in time exist in the very same sense. The emergence of this new metaphysics approximately coincides with the emergence of time travel fictions (which, astonishingly, were never told in ancient times or other cultures). As part of his defence of  fourdimensionalism, Lewis also defended the internal consistency of at least some time travel stories. I will argue that, even granting Lewis's assumptions about time, personal identity, fiction, and so on, time travel stories still turn out to harbour hidden self-contradictions. I will hunt these contradictions among the "what ifs" (the counterfactuals) that are implicity true in any paradigm time travel story.

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