This week, Steve and Christabel try their best to avoid suffering the fate of John William Dunne, who was laughed out of metaphysics circles for proposing that time is an infinite layer cake. In fact, in answering this week’s question, “How long is a minute?”, both hosts are clear on one thing; that you cannot have your cake and eat (all of the temporal parts of) it too. In fact, Christabel argues that the project of destroying a whole cake is just as problematic as that of travelling back in time to kill your grandfather. But time travel isn’t found to be completely paradoxical, and the possibility of travelling back to your favourite minute of a Weird Al Yankovich concert is found to be broadly unobjectionable (at least as concerns logical consistency).

Christabel introduces us to distinctions between ecstatic, historical, personal, external, absolute and proper times, and makes the case for perdurantism; the theory that all objects that persist through time are four-dimensional spacetime worms, and that only small slices of these worms exist at any given time. Steve is more convinced by this view than the presentist’s denial of the existence of the past and future, which he likens to the philosophical commitments shared by babies and Beach Boys. 


Read Christabel’s paper about time, as mentioned in the episode: 
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10217604/1/10.1515_krt-2025-0022%20%281%29.pdf


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