Is time a logically coherent notion in the way we commonly understand it?

We normally think of the passage of time in terms of a 'moving present'--a point that moves steadily futurewards along the temporal dimension, so to speak, and carries us along from our births to our deaths. However, many philosophers, from McTaggart on, have argued that this idea is incoherent, and that 'now' no more refers to a genuine feature of reality than 'here' does. On their view (the 'B-series view) 'now' is an indexical term that simply refers to whatever time you are at, just as 'here' refers to whichever place you are at. It is doubtful whether the idea of a moving present is strictly incoherent. But, even if it isn't, our best theories of reality may well do without it. Perhaps we can explain everything we want to explain, including our experience of the passage of time, without positing a moving present. Indeed some philosophers argue that, even if you do posit a moving present, it is no help at all in explaining the things we want to explain. There is a huge literature on...

In the first Superman movie, after Lois Lane is killed in the earthquake, Superman appears to reverse time by flying around the Earth and reversing its rotation. Thinking about it, this makes no sense. But in the movie, it has a certain plausibility. So what gives Superman's feat its plausibility? (A friend of mine suggested that the Earth didn't actually reverse its rotation due to Superman flying around it, but that the reversing rotation was just meant to suggest that Superman, by flying so fast, was able to go back in time himself. But this, too, makes no sense.)

You are right that Superman's feat of resurrecting Lois Lane makeslittle sense. The same is true of nearly all films (or stories)involving time travel. The trouble arises when characters 'change thepast'. That whole idea is of doubtful consistency. If Superman makes itthe case that Lois didn't die yesterday, then how come we saw a realityin which she got squashed by the earthquake? Maybe some sense can bemade of this by supposing that reality has a branching structure, andthat Lois dies on one branch but not the other. But even this doesn'tseem to do the trick. Isn't Superman supposed to be saving Lois, not just adding something to a structure in which she is also still squashed? Analternative would be to suppose that Superman (and we viewers) inhabita Supertime, such that at Superdate 1 ordinary reality contains Loisdying yesterday, but by Superdate 2 Superman has changed ordinaryreality so that Lois survived yesterday. This is no doubt how weunderstand the movie, and why it seems plausible...