The persistent time traveller: contemporary issues in the metaphysics of time and persistence

Abstract

The main theme of this thesis is time travel; time travel cases—both from relativistic physics and science fiction—provide or highlight deep problems for certain positions in contemporary debates about the metaphysical nature of time and of how material objects persist through time. This thesis explores the implications of these discussions; more specifically, I draw attention to some of the interesting things we can learn about presentism (a theory of time) and endurantism (a theory of persistence) from discussions of time travel cases that have been raised recently in the literature. In the end, I argue in favour of what I consider a non-standard theory of persistence, which I call transdurantism, according to which persisting objects are temporally extended simples.