Dear all, this is to remind you that the next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 30th October. We are delighted to welcome Yael Loewenstein (Houston/Cambridge), who will be giving a paper entitled 'Against the Standard Solution to the Grandfather Paradox'. The abstract is below:
*Imagine that 1000 time travelers travel back in time, each with the intention of killing his or her own infant self. Do they succeed? We start with the assumption that there is no branching time. If the possibility of backwards time travel is not to lead to logical contradiction, every time traveler must fail for some reason or another: perhaps one slips on a banana peel, another kills the wrong child, etc. Although a logically consistent story can be told in which each time traveler fails, it is seemingly inexplicable that something will go wrong for each one.For a time, this inexplicability objection was thought to provide powerful evidence that there is something incoherent about the possibility of backwards time travel in a universe without branching time. Following David Lewis (1976), however, there is now near-consensus in the literature that the objection has no bite: there is nothing anomalous or inexplicable about the fact that something will go wrong in each case. For as Jenann Ismael (2003) puts it, "...it is build into the description of the class of cases that we are considering...that they are failures, in the same way it is built into the description of the class of cases in which I don't get ahold of my mom on the telephone that they are unsuccessful...And just as in the case of my failed attempts at mom-calling, there are diverse and unrelated explanations of the individual failures, but nothing spooky or coincidental about the fact that all founder." I will argue that although the failure to commit auto infanticide is indeed already built into the description of the class of cases being considered, the example differs from Ismael’s example, and others like it, in a crucial respect. Attending to this difference helps to pinpoint what makes the grandfather paradox so troublesome for the possibility of backwards time travel, and where the inexplicability (still) lurks.* The meeting will be held at 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. *If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk at the Moral Sciences Club, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com <mscsecretar...@gmail.com>) by midday on Monday.* This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and it will take place in the evening at a location to be determined (those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details by email closer to the time). Best, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
