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Selected papers relating to time

2024

2023

2017

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2016

2013

  • ‘Fictional Branching Time?’, in A.Iacona & F.Correia (eds.) Around the Tree: Semantic and Metaphysical Issues Concerning Branching and the Open Future (Springer: Synthese library no.361) (2013), 81-94. (Bourne and Caddick Bourne) (see Chapter 5 of Time in Fiction)

2011

  • ‘Fatalism and the Future’, in C. Callender (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) (Bourne)

2007

2006

  • 'A Theory of Presentism', Canadian Journal of Philosophy (2006) 36: 1-23 (Bourne) (See Chapter 2 of A Future for Presentism)

2004

  • 'Future Contingents, Non-Contradiction and the Law of Excluded Middle Muddle', Analysis (2004) 64: 122-128 (Bourne) (See Chapter 3 of A Future for Presentism)

  • 'Becoming Inflated', British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (2004)  55: 107-119 (Bourne) (See Chapter 7 of A Future for Presentism)

2002

  • 'When am I?  A Tense Time for Some Tense Theorists?', Australasian Journal of Philosophy, (2002) 80: 359-371 (Bourne) (See Chapter 1 of A Future for Presentism)

The Absurdity of Rational Choice: Time Travel,
Foreknowledge, and the Aesthetic Dimension of Newcomb Problems

By Bourne & Caddick Bourne

Nikk Effingham and Huw Price argue that in certain cases of Newcomb problems involving time travel and foreknowledge, being given information about the future makes it rational to choose as an evidential decision theorist would choose. Although the cases they consider have some intuitive pull, and so appear to aid in answering the question of what it is rational to do, we argue that their respective positions are not compelling. Newcomb problems are structured such that whichever way one chooses, one might be led by one’s preferred decision theory to miss out on some riches (riches which others obtain whilst employing their preferred decision theory). According to the novel aesthetic diagnosis we shall offer of the Newcomb dialectic, missing out in this way does not render one irrational but, rather, subject to being seen as absurd. This is a different kind of cost but not one that undermines one’s rationality.

Philosophies 2024, 9, 99. https://doi.org/10.3390/ philosophies9040099

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