CFP: /Philosophies/ Special Issue: Time Travel

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue will be devoted to papers in the philosophy of time travel. Philosophy of time travel has come a long way since the foundational writings in the field by Kurt Gödel, David Lewis, and Paul Horwich. Whether driven by concerns about the metaphysics of time, the philosophy of freedom, spacetime physics, theories of persistence, agency theory, theories of personal identity, philosophy of action, philosophy of fiction, or even the philosophy of computation, time travel discussions are proliferating in a host of philosophical sub-disciplines. Philosophy of time travel now ranges from theories of how different interpretations of quantum mechanics might try to resolve Grandfather Paradoxes, through discussions about the impact that time travel cases might have on our understanding of life’s value and death’s harm, to questions about philosophical aesthetics, probability theory, historical artefacts, abstract entities, Divine identity, and the ultimate cosmological/theological origins of the universe. Particular areas of recent interest include the question of how far time travellers into the past might retain any meaningful sense of free agency or whether time travel worlds would have to be rigidly deterministic or even fatalistic. I very much hope that this Special Issue may extend the scope of philosophy of time travel still further. This Special Issue aims both to reflect and to broaden the range of time travel issues now in philosophical discussion. My hope is that this Special Issue will help philosophy of time travel boast still more relevant and accessible debates that both possess their own intrinsic interest and intersect with, e.g., metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of religion. Papers are invited from potential contributors on any aspect of the philosophy of time travel (including, but not exhausted by, the topics mentioned above and the topics in the list of keywords below). I look forward to your submissions.

Dr. Alasdair Richmond
Guest Editor

Keywords

• time travel
• causal loops
• persistence
• object loops and information loops
• Grandfather Paradoxes
• closed timelike curves
• personal time and external time
• personal identity
• free will
• mereology
• determinism and fatalism
• metaphysics
• philosophy of religion
• spacetime
• fiction.

Please contact Guest Editor Dr. Alasdair Richmond or Special Issue Editor Clyde Cui at [email protected] for further information.

Philosophies (ISSN 2409-9287, https://www.mdpi.com/journal/philosophies) is an international peer-reviewed open access journal. The journal has recently been indexed into Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) in Web of Science.

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