Doctor Who as Philosophy: Four-Dimensionalism and Time Travel

Doctor Who is the longest-running science fiction program on television, having been in continuous production between 1963 and 1989. “Classic” Doctor Who was widely syndicated around the world and appeared to many US viewers on their local Public Broadcasting System channel. The show was rebooted with continuity to the original program on BBC One in 2005. The success of the show rests on the appeal of its central character and his/her traveling companions, the creativity of its bizarre locations and alien adversaries, and, of course, the diversity of destinations that its time travel format allows it. This chapter is about the apparent nature of time in Doctor Who and, by extension, what the nature of “our” universe would have to be like if time travel were actual. After looking over infamous paradoxes and philosophical arguments and rehearsing some traditional philosophical approaches to the nature of time travel and the problem of changing history, I outline the theory that best accords with the reality of time travel in Doctor Who, that of “Four-Dimensional Realism.”