Are there any good philosophical reasons for thinking that time travel is possible?
Yes and no. Let me explain. Some people think that is flat-out impossible. They appeal, for example, to puzzles like the Grandfather Paradox: if time travel were possible, the argument goes, I would be able to go back to 19xx and kill my Grandfather before he met my Grandmother. This would mean that I would never exist, and so the scenario requires both that I do and that I don't exist: contradiction. This is meant to show that time travel is impossible. Philosophers can help us sort through that sort of problem, and in fact some have. David Lewis's "The Paradoxes of Time Travel" (you can find it in his Philosophical Papers , volume II) is still a lucid and useful sorting of the issues. Lewis argues -- correctly, I think -- that the Grandfather Paradox doesn't show what it's meant to. Roughly, the idea is this: if I do someday travel back to 19xx gunning for Grandpa, then first, it's true even now in 2008 that there was a deranged philosopher lurking around in those days gunning for Earl Stairs. ...
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