Dr Stephanie Rennick, lecturer in Philosophy at Glasgow University, and Dr Juliette Harrisson, from Den of Geek, discuss free will, fate and destiny. How much control do we have over our lives and how do our decisions affect others? Does God have a plan for you, or are you completely autonomous? Discussion panel with Dr Stephanie Rennick, Dr Juliette Harrison, and more, moderated by Clara.

Backwards time travel, at least at first glance, seems to allow for the possibility of bilking attempts - attempts to change the past and thereby engender a contradiction (as in the Grandfather Paradox) – and thus defenders of the possibility of time travel must account for why and how such attempts fail. Analogously, foreknowledge seems to allow for future-direct bilking attempts: that is, attempts to avoid a future that is known and thus in some sense fixed. This paper outlines the answers offered by Lewis and others as to why and how past-directed bilking attempts fail, and more importantly, argues that the same explanation can be offered in relation to the future: the future is just as immutable as the past, and the very same banana peels that trip up the would-be grandfather killer can foil the future-bilking foreknower. In either case, a slip, or a series of slips, will suffice.

This paper considers the folk intuition that a foreknown future would be counter-intuitively and unattractively fixed, and seeks to show that we make a mistake when we reject foreknowledge wholesale on the grounds that it entails problematic predestination (‘metaphysical fatalism’). To this end I consider two crucial yet overlooked distinctions: (i) the different senses in which we might mean 'fixing the future', and (ii) the various kinds of foreknowledge the folk intuition might have in mind. I argue that neither ordinary foreknowledge nor the knowledge of the time traveller gives rise to problematic predestination, and that the latter arises only when extra characteristics (such as infallibility) are implicitly built in to our conception of a foreknower.

This talk introduces three major time travel paradoxes through the lens of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and considers the requirements for an internally consistent time travel tale.