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Discusses an argument from preventability to the effect that the past and the present are real, while the future is not. The argument draws on an analysis of ‘It is a fact that p at time t’ as ‘p, and it is logically impossible for there to exist anyone who would have been able, at t, to prevent it from being the case that p’. However, there are two strong objections to the argument from preventability, one relating to backward causation and causal loops, and one relating to the truth conditions for subjunctive conditionals.

This chapter begins by identifying three features of Aristotle's teleology, and more generally of an Aristotelian frame of mind about teleology, that may induce suspicion. The first is that an end can serve as a ‘cause’: as well as the sort of causation we all recognize, efficient causation, there are other forms, one of which is teleological causation. The second is the suggestion that things other than agents are influenced by teleology, and that objects can have these ends or purposes non-derivatively from the ends or purposes of agents. The third is that teleological explanation can be fundamental: it need not itself be true in virtue of some underlying efficient causal facts. The chapter then discusses why we should care about teleology, the possibility of final causation, teleology and backward causation, and Aristotelian rocks and telic pyramids.

Chapter 5 surveys the various causal paradoxes of time travel. Section 1 introduces the concept of a causal loop and reviews some of the standard arguments against backward causation. Sections 2 focuses on the bootstrapping paradox, and the question of whether or not time travel allows for self-caused events. Section 3 addresses the ex nihilo paradox, and the question of whether or not time travel allows for uncaused events. Section 4 looks at the restoration paradox, and the question of how to understand the life cycle of an object in a causal loop. Section 5 considers D. H. Mellor’s frequency-based argument against causal loops. Section 6 discusses Michael Tooley’s counterfactual-based argument against backward causation.

Everything that happens, happens over a period of time, and never at an instant. Time must have a topology, but it only has a metric if there are laws of nature. The future is what we can causally affect; the past is what causally affects us (and so neither backward nor simultaneous causation are possible). There are both indexical and non‐indexical temporal facts (the A‐series of events is not reducible to the B‐series.) Necessarily, time has no beginning and no end.

Why should the wishes of the dead be given weight? An intellectually satisfying answer requires drawing on and applying the substantial philosophical literature on the possibility of posthumous harm. This chapter defends the view that people can be harmed by events that occur after their deaths. It rejects criticisms based on an ‘experience requirement’ for well‐being or on the ‘problem of the subject’. The account given here, which substantially follows Pitcher's and Feinberg's, argues that whether people's goals are fulfilled could depend on posthumous events and that the non‐fulfilment of their goals could harm them in important ways that do not depend on backwards causation. The chapter concludes by connecting the account to organ retrieval.

Elements compose organic bodies, including tissues (homogenous bodies) and organs (heterogeneous bodies), and in so doing are for the sake of the whole organism of which they are the transformed parts. But the starting point for the explanation of living things is the identification of its functions: nutrition and reproduction for plants, perception and locomotion for animals, and virtue and intelligence for humans. Since the functions of plants are fundamental to all other living things, the vegetative functions are the primary ones in biological explanation. Thus, the survival and reproduction of each species is the basis for its explanation, and these are represented as goods for it. But although goods come first in the order of explanation, they come last in the order of development of the organism. Thus, intelligence is the last thing developed by a human, even though everything else has come to be for the sake of this. The reversal of explanatory and genetic order does not, however, imply some kind of mysterious “backwards causation”.

Criticism of a popular argument for refusing to allow backward subjunctives conditionals, i.e. ones whose consequent pertains to a time earlier than that of the antecedent; and of accounts of such conditionals by Jackson and Davis. A tenable account of them is found to be nested within Lewis's analysis of forward subjunctives. Discussion of related issues concerning Lewis's notion of counterparts and of non‐historical conditionals (’If it were a ruby, it would be red’).

Both simultaneous and backward causation are logically impossible. S is omnipotent during some period of time T iff, in each sub-period within T, S knows of all logically necessary propositions and of all logically contingent true propositions about every time earlier than the beginning of that sub-period and of all the propositions that those propositions entail, that they are true; he is not influenced by non-rational influences; and is able to cause by an act beginning at any instant t and ending at any instant t₂, both during that period, any logically contingent event M beginning at any instant t₁ later than t and ending at t₂, which does not require him to be influenced by non-rational influences. It is logically possible that there is an omnipotent person. Necessarily an omnipotent person is omnipresent, perfectly free, and creator of the universe.

The second response to the epiphenomenal challenge is to deny that epiphenomenalism has any implications that are skeptical of responsibility. Such a compatibilist response is seemingly ruled out by adopting the classical compatibilist response to the challenge of hard determinism. Whether this is in fact so is explored in this chapter, the thesis being that in a certain range of cases we are responsible for effects that we do not cause so long as those effects are on one horn of an epiphenomenal fork the existence of which we know and the other horn of which we can control. Because such responsibility across the horns of an epiphenomenal fork can involve control of the past, and because a general control of the past to the extent that we can control the future is implausible, some care is taken to limit the scope of what in the past we can control by our present decisions. These limits are cast in terms of there being a strong necessitation of a past event by a present decision which necessitation is known to the actor as he acts to make it have been the case that such past event occurred.