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Grandfather’s Murder

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2025

Brian Garrett
Brian Garrett*
Affiliation:
School of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, ACT, Australia
*
Email: Brian.Garrett@anu.edu.au
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Abstract

Is travel to the past possible or does it harbour some hidden contradiction? It seems that if time travel is possible, a man could travel back in time and kill his grandfather before his father was conceived. Yet this is impossible. This conundrum has become known as the Grandfather Paradox. Some philosophers have attempted to defuse the paradox, and yet others have argued that the standard resolution of the paradox is open to a charge of incoherence. I argue that this charge is ungrounded.

Keywords

David Lewistime travelGrandfather Paradoxcounterfactuals
Type
Research Article
Information
Think , Volume 24 , Issue 70 , Summer 2025 , pp. 39 - 41
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of Philosophy.

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References

Baron, S. and Colyvan, M. (2019) ‘The End of Mystery’, American Philosophical Quarterly 56: .10.2307/48570634CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hull, R. (1934) Murder of My Aunt (London: Faber & Faber).Google Scholar
Lewis, D. (1976) ‘The Paradoxes of Time Travel’, American Philosophical Quarterly 13: .Google Scholar
Loewenstein, Y. R. (2022) ‘Against the Standard Solution to the Grandfather Paradox’, Synthese 200: . https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03543-y.CrossRefGoogle Scholar