The key work is Lewis 1976, a defense of the logical possibility of backward time travel, from which a large number of subsequent treatments take their cue. The best introduction to the topic in general so far is chapter 8 of Dainton (second edition 2010), Dainton 2010 being the best general philosophical resource available on time and space.
Since Lewis, philosophical time travel questions include the following: given that a traveler into the past cannot create any paradoxical outcomes on arrival, what then would stay their hand? Are the constraints on a traveler’s actions admissible within our ordinary understanding of physical law or human agency? Is time travel compatible with dynamic time or even with the existence of time itself? Can backward time travel be physically possible within a single history? If a time traveler meets another stage of him- or herself, is the traveler in two places at once, and what theory of persistence can cope with this puzzling multiplication? Can time-travel spacetimes resolve otherwise intractable computational problems?ĭespite several hundred philosophical and scientific articles, book chapters, and Internet resources devoted to philosophical problems posed by time travel, there is currently no full-length monograph or anthology on the subject. Granted, the physics, persistence conditions, agency, and epistemology of agents in such worlds might look weird indeed. So other worlds or multiple temporal dimensions are not necessary to make time travel consistent. In Lewis’s analysis, a traveler can arrive in the past of the same history they come from provided that the traveler’s actions on arrival are consistent with the history that they come from. Lewis concludes that time travel could occur in a possible world, albeit perhaps a strange world that would feature (or seem to feature) strange restrictions on actions.
A key philosophical text on time travel is Lewis 1976 and its argument for the logical possibility of certain backward time travel journeys and even for the possibility of casual loops. Some interesting forerunners notwithstanding, serious physical interest in time travel begins with Gödel’s 1949a demonstration that general relativity permits space-times that are riddled with closed timelike curves (“CTCs” henceforth). Besides metaphysical discussions, some time travel works draw on the philosophies of science, spacetime, and computation.
The debate has gradually shifted from focusing on time travel’s logical possibility (which possibility is now generally although not universally granted) to sundry topics including persistence, causation, personal identity, freedom, composition, and natural laws, to name but a few. Time travel is a philosophical growth industry, with many issues in metaphysics and elsewhere recently transformed by consideration of time travel possibilities.
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