Whether we’re reading H.G. Wells, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, or Kurt Vonnegut, time travel is a wonderful narrative trick, freeing a story from the normal ‘one damn thing after another’ progression of time. But many philosophers claim it can never be more than that because backwards causation in general, and time travel in particular, are logically impossible.In this paper I examine one type of argument commonly given for this disappointing conclusion: the time travel paradoxes. Happily for science fiction fans, these (...) arguments fall far short of showing what they are intended to show. Why they fail can be better understood in the light of an analogy between these arguments and some arguments libertarians offer against determinism. (shrink)

Sometimes also called retro causation. A common feature of our world seems to be that in all cases of causation, the cause and the effect are placed in time so that the cause precedes its effect temporally. Our normal understanding of causation assumes this feature to such a degree that we intuitively have great difficulty imagining things differently. The notion of backward causation, however, stands for the idea that the temporal order of cause and effect is a mere contingent feature (...) and that there may be cases where the cause is causally prior to its effect but where the temporal order of the cause and effect is reversed with respect to normal causation, i.e. there may be cases where the effect temporally, but not causally, precedes its cause. (shrink)