A Nonlinear History of Time Travel - Issue 40: Learning
▻http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/a-nonlinear-history-of-time-travel
I doubt that any phenomenon, real or imagined, has inspired more perplexing, convoluted, and ultimately futile philosophical analysis than time travel has. (Some possible contenders, determinism and free will, are bound up anyway in the arguments over time travel.) In his classic textbook, An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, John Hospers tackles the question: “Is it logically possible to go back in time—say, to 3000 B.C., and help the Egyptians build the pyramids? We must be very careful about this one.” It’s easy to say—we habitually use the same words to talk about time as we do when talking about space—and it’s easy to imagine. “In fact, H. G. Wells did imagine it in The Time Machine (1895), and every reader imagines it with him.” (Hospers misremembers The Time Machine: “A person in (...)