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Time Travel, Parahistory and Hume

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Roy A. Sorensen
Roy A. Sorensen
Affiliation:
University of Delaware
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Extract

Should I have the opportunity to travel back in time to converse with great philosophers, Hume would be high on my itinerary. My gratitude for his insights and hospitality would surely tempt me to reciprocate by telling him about my time travels. But I fear he would not believe me. For the reasoning underlying Hume's famous scepticism about miracles dooms my tales of time travel to an incredulous reception. The ensuing paragraphs will be dedicated to an elucidation of this fear. This elucidation is of more than historical interest, since Hume's reasoning about miracles still strikes many contemporary philosophers y as cogent. Thus the scepticism about time travel that I attribute to Hume should also be shared by his followers. It should be noted that the scepticism at issue is epistemological rather than metaphysical. The key question will not be ‘Is time travel possible?’ We shall instead ask whether it is possible to justify a belief in a report of time travel. The metaphysical issue will only be addressed in response to the question of whether one can be an epistemological sceptic about time travel without being a metaphysical sceptic.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy , Volume 62 , Issue 240 , April 1987 , pp. 227 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1987

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References

1 I thank Douglas Stalker and Christopher Boorse for their helpful criticisms, suggestions and comments on a previous draft of this paper.

2 Some of the standard objections to the logical possibility of time travel meet with ingenious replies in David Lewis's ‘The Paradoxes of Time Travel’, American Philosophical Quarterly 13, No. 2 (April 1976), 145–152.

3 David, Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1809, orig. 1748), II, 86.Google Scholar

4 The relevance of Hume's passage about the tall tales of travellers for the history of anthropology has been emphasized by Derek Freeman in his devastating critique, Margaret Mead and Samoa (Harvard University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

5 Price's article appeared in Science 111, No. 3165 (1955), 359–367. It provoked a sequence of replies, some rather nasty. Price's article, along with commentary from critics, has been reprinted in Philosophy and Parapsychology, Jan Ludwig (ed.) (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1978). Antony Flew credits Price with being the first to extend Hume's scepticism about miracles to parapsychology in ‘Parapsychology: Science or Pseudo- Science’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 61, Nos. 1 & 2 (January-April 1980), 100–114.Google ScholarPubMed

6 David, Hume, The History of Great Britain from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688 (New York: R. Worthington, 1880), 345.Google Scholar

7 Lee F. Worth describes how this strategy might be executed in ‘Normalizing the Paranormal’, American Philosophical Quarterly 15, No. 1 (January 1978), 47–56.

8 Eric von Daniken introduced the ancient astronaut hypothesis in his best seller Chariots of the Gods? (1968). His defence of the hypothesis was continued through a chain of subsequent books.

9 George, Campbell, Dissertation on Miracles (Edinburgh, 1763), 107–108.Google Scholar

10 See Quine's section on translating logical connectives (pp. 57–61) in his Word and Object.

11 Davidson's scepticism is presented in ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1973–74), 5–20.Google Scholar

12 Putnam's ‘It Ain't Necessarily So’ appeared in the Journal of Philosophy 59, No. 22 (1962), 658–671. Robert Weingard's criticism is made in ‘On Travelling Back in Time’, Synthese 24, No. 1/2 (July/August, 1972), 117–132.