Time: 10:00-11:30 Wednesdays
Place: G 306
URL: http://michaelde.com/teaching/philoftime/philoftime.html
Office hours: By appointment
Email: mikejde@gmail.com
What does it mean to persist, to exist from one time to another while undergoing change? Is the future open or indeterminate, and if so, how? Is tense a primitive, ineliminable notion? Is time travel possible, or does the idea face insuperable difficulties? In answering these questions and more, we will look at competing views about
For each of the topics we will look at seminal essays from each side of the debate to gain a fair perspective on the relevant issues.
Prerequisites: None
Evaluation: Four small essays each approximately 2000-2500 words and worth 25% of the final grade
Texts: A selection of journal articles and book excerpts
20.04 (Week 2, Introductory material) : Ned Markosian, Time, Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy
27.04 (Week 3, Perdurance vs endurance) :
04.05 (moved to 11.05 at 11:45) (Week 4, Perdurance vs endurance continued) :
11.05 (moved to 18.05 at 11:45) (Week 5, The open future) :
25.05 (10:00) (Week 6, The open future continued) : John MacFarlane, Future contingents and relative truth, The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 53 (no. 212), 2003, pp. 321-336
25.05 (11:45 in G 227a) (Week 6, Time travel) : David Lewis, The paradoxes of time travel, American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 13 (no. 2), 1976, pp. 145-152
01.06 (Week 7, Time travel continued) : Peter B. M. Vranas, Can I kill my younger self? Time travel and the retrosuicide paradox, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 90 (no. 4), 2009, pp. 520-534
08.06 (Week 8, Time travel continued) : Paul Horwich, On some alleged paradoxes of time travel, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 72 (no. 14), 1975, pp. 432-444
15.06 (Week 9, Presentism) : John Bigelow, Presentism and properties, Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 10, 1996, pp. 35-52
22.06 (Week 10, Presentism continued) : Ned Markosian, A defense of presentism, in Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Vol. 1, Oxford University Press, 2004
29.06 (Week 11, Presentism continued) : Ulrich Meyer, The presentist's dilemma, Philosophical Studies, vol. 122 (no. 3), 2005, pp. 213-225
06.07 (Week 12, Presentism continued) : Steven Savitt, Presentism and eternalism in perspective, in The Ontology of Spacetime Vol. 1 (editor Dennis Dieks), Elsevier, 2006, pp. 111-127
13.07 (Week 13, Grand Finale!) : J. Ellis McTaggart, The unreality of time, Mind, vol. 17 (no. 68), 1908, pp. 457-474