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Ryan Wasserman presents a wide-ranging exploration of puzzles raised by the possibility of time travel, including the grandfather paradox, the bootstrapping paradox, and the twin paradox of special relativity. He draws out their implications for our understanding of time, tense, freedom, fatalism, causation, counterfactuals, laws of nature, persistence, change, and mereology. The Paradoxes of Time Travel is written in an accessible style, and filled with entertaining examples from physics, science fiction, and popular culture.
List of contents
- 1: Introduction
- 2: Temporal Paradoxes
- 3: Paradoxes of Freedom I
- 4: Paradoxes of Freedom II
- 5: Causal Paradoxes
- 6: Paradoxes of Identity
About the author
Ryan Wasserman is professor of philosophy at Western Washington University, and co-editor of Metametaphysics (OUP 2009).
Summary
Ryan Wasserman explores a range of fascinating puzzles raised by the possibility of time travel, with entertaining examples from physics, science fiction, and popular culture, and he draws out their implications for our understanding of time, tense, freedom, fatalism, causation, counterfactuals, laws of nature, persistence, change, and mereology.
Additional text
This is a good read.
Report
Wasserman's book fills a gap in the academic literature on time travel. ... as far as I know, this is the first book length work devoted to the topic of time travel by a metaphysician homed in on the most important metaphysical issues. Wasserman addresses these issues while still managing to include pertinent scientific discussion and enjoyable time-travel snippets from science fiction. The book is well organized and is suitable for good undergraduate metaphysics students, for philosophy graduate students, and for professional philosophers. It reads like a sophisticated and excellent textbook even though it includes many novel ideas. John W. Carroll, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
