Causing Yesterday's Effects

Author:

Spellman Lynne

Abstract

In this paper I wish to examine the claim that it would be possible for us now to do something which would be the posterior efficient cause of some past event. I am not prepared to discuss the physics of elementary particles, and I will not consider what is sometimes called time reversal. Rather my analysis will be limited to cases in which it is alleged that we, in a world of middle-sized physical objects where most causes precede or are simultaneous with their effects, could conceivably do something so that something else should have happened. I will argue that some of the cases which meet this description are indeed backwards causation if one is prepared to make certain (not uncommon) assumptions about time. I will not evaluate these assumptions; rather I will try to clarify them and to make plain their implications for causality. For the argument about backwards causation is most fundamentally, or so I will try to show, an argument about the nature of time.

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)

Subject

Philosophy

Reference27 articles.

1. Time travel and changing the past

2. The Priority of Causes

3. Causal Disorder Again

4. Temporal Flux;McCall;American Philosophical Quarterly,1966

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