Diversity Reading List

Abstract: Here are some intuitions we have about the nature of space and time. There is something fundamentally different about the past, present, and future. What is definitive of the past is that the past events are fixed. What is definitive of the future is that future events are not fixed. What is definitive of the present is that it marks the objective ontological border between the past and the future and, by doing so, instantiates a particularly salient phenomenological property of nowness. Call the combination of these intuitions according to which there exists an objective present, a fixed past, and an open future, the intuitive view. I argue that, given the intuitive view, the possibility of backwards causation - and hence, for instance, backwards time travel - is problematic.

Abstract: In this paper, I argue that the thesis that time travel is logically possible, is inconsistent with the necessary truth of any of the usual 'open future objective present' models of the universe. It has been relatively uncontroversial until recently to hold that presentism is inconsistent with the possibility of time travel. I argue that recent arguments to the contrary do not show that presentism is consistent with time travel. Moreover, the necessary truth of other open future-objective present models which we might, prima facie, have supposed to be more amenable to the possibility of time travel, turn out also to be inconsistent with this possibility.