2. The Myth of Passage

WE NOW ENTER UPON what one prominent philosopher has recently called “the most fundamental question in the philosophy of time”: “Whether a static or a dynamic conception of the world is correct.”¹ This question is not only fundamental for the philosophy of time but is also, as we have seen, foundational for our conception of divine eternity. For if the dynamic conception of time is correct, God is most plausibly understood to be temporal. What arguments, then, are there for and against the dynamic conception of time?

EXPOSITION

We have already had occasion to mention tense as it plays a role in language. Although there are languages that do not express tenses by means of inflecting verbs, there is no tenseless language in the world.² This is doubtlessly due to the fact that language reflects our experience of the world as being tensed, as having a past, present, and future. Some philosophers, however, see an even deeper significance to linguistic tense.³ They argue that linguistic tense is, as it were, a window on the world: Our language is tensed because reality is tensed. That is to say, there really are tensed facts which are objective features of the world. For example, it is a fact that Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo and that Bill Clinton will not be elected president in 2008. Linguistic tense merely exhibits the tense that is a feature of time itself.

How might this be shown? Advocates of a dynamic conception of time argue that the ineliminability of tense from language and its indispensability for human life make it plausible that tense is a feature not merely of language but also of the world. Against this argument, defenders of a static view of time have pursued two strategies: They either try to show that tense can be eliminated from language without any loss of meaning or else they admit that tense cannot be eliminated from language but deny that this has any significance, since all one needs in order to make tensed sentences true or false is tenseless facts. Accordingly, the advocate of the dynamic view needs to thwart both of these strategies if his argument is to succeed.

We can formulate the linguistic argument for tensed facts as follows:

1. Tensed sentences apparently express tensed facts.



2. The apparent expression of tensed facts by tensed sentences should be accepted as correct unless

i. tensed sentences are shown to be translatable into tenseless sentences without any loss of meaning

or

ii. tensed facts are shown to be unnecessary for the truth of tensed sentences.

3. Tensed sentences have not been shown to be translatable into tenseless sentences without any loss of meaning.



4. Tensed facts have not been shown to be unnecessary for the truth of tensed sentences.



5. Therefore, the apparent expression of tensed facts by tensed sentences should be accepted as correct.

The argument purports to show that there are tensed facts about the world and that therefore the dynamic conception of time is correct.

CRITIQUE

Premise (1) of the argument is obviously true. By our tensed sentences we try to convey facts about the world. For example, when we say, “Churchill was the British Prime Minister during World War II,” we are purporting to relay some fact about the world. Premise (2) is based on the conviction that unless we have some good reason to doubt this expression of tensed facts, we ought to accept it. Such a conviction seems quite reasonable. A correspondence view of truth holds that if a tensed sentence or statement is true, then it corresponds with reality. Therefore, if any tensed sentences are true, then reality must be tensed. There are only two known ways of escaping this conclusion, which are specified in clauses (i) and (ii). The crucial premises in the argument are therefore (3) and (4), which try to bar these routes. The route referred to in (3) has been called “The Old Tenseless Theory of Language” and the route mentioned in (4) “The New Tenseless Theory of Language.” Let us examine each in turn.

The Old Tenseless Theory of Language

The Old Tenseless Theory seems to have originated with Bertrand Russell during the first decade of the twentieth century. Thereafter, for around three-quarters of a century, the standard answer of defenders of static time to the linguistic argument was that tense is a superfluous and even annoying feature of ordinary language which philosophically and scientifically trained minds are only too happy to discard.

De-tensers, as they are sometimes called, held that any tensed sentence can be translated without loss of meaning into a standard tenseless form. This was done in one of two ways. First, one could replace tensed expressions with tenseless verbs and dates/clock-times. For example, the tensed sentence “Mrs. Brown was not at home” could be translated into the tenseless sentence “Mrs. Brown is not at home on May 8, 1906” (the italics indicating that the “is” is tenseless).

Second, alternatively, one could replace tensed expressions with tenseless verbs and what are called “token-reflexive” expressions.⁴ For example, “Mrs. Brown was not at home” could be translated into the tenseless, token-reflexive sentence, “Mrs. Brown is not at home earlier than this utterance.” De-tensers held that these tenseless translations have the same meaning as their tensed counterparts. Since such translations state merely tenseless facts, it follows that tense is a superfluous feature of ordinary language which gives us no insight into the nature of the world.

As the reader might surmise from its name, the Old Tenseless Theory of Language is now widely recognized as a failed project. Recent work in the philosophy of language has made it quite evident that the purported tenseless translations do not have the same meaning as their tensed counterparts. Three broad considerations undergird this judgment.

First, tensed sentences are informative in a way that their purported tenseless translations are not. Human thought and action would be paralyzed if the content of our beliefs were exclusively tenseless in character. The work of the Stanford philosopher John Perry has especially served to emphasize this point.⁵ Perry invites us to imagine a faculty professor who holds the tenseless belief, “The faculty meeting starts at noon.” All morning long the professor has held that belief, and therefore that belief cannot be the explanation why at noon he gets up and goes to the meeting. What explains the change in his behavior is that he has come to hold the tensed belief, “The meeting is starting now.” As Perry notes, “These indexicals are essential, in that replacement of them by other terms destroys the force of the explanation. . . .”⁶ The tenseless counterparts of tensed sentences cannot motivate timely thought and action because they give us no knowledge de praesenti (knowledge of what is now the case).

This point is underlined by the ineptness of some of the supposed tenseless translations of tensed sentences. Take, for example, the tensed sentence “It is now 4:30.” We can imagine situations in which a person’s life would depend on his holding such a belief. But the tenseless counterpart of this sentence is either “It is 4:30 at 4:30,” which is a mere tautology, or “It is 4:30 simultaneous with this utterance,” which is useless unless we also know that “This utterance is occurring now,” which is a tensed belief. In both cases the tenseless versions are insufficient to motivate timely action because they do not inform us whether or not it actually is 4:30.

The fact that tensed beliefs can motivate timely behavior in a way that the tenseless counterparts of those beliefs cannot is a convincing demonstration that tenseless sentences do not have the same meaning as the tensed sentences allegedly translated by them.

Second, tenseless date-sentences are informative in a way that their tensed counterparts are not. I might hold a tensed belief, for example, that “Mrs. Brown was not at home” without knowing or believing that she is not at home on May 8, 1906, as is stated in the tenseless version of the sentence. Perry also points out that if one has lost track of time, he might rationally believe that “The meeting starts at noon, September 16, 1976” and yet deny at that time that “The meeting is starting now.” This shows that these two sentences cannot have the same meaning, as the Old Tenseless Theory asserts. Because tenseless date-sentences contain information which their tensed counterparts do not, it is evident that they do not have the same meaning.

Third, tensed sentences do not imply the existence of sentence tokens as do their token-reflexive counterparts. Consider the sentence, “No sentence tokens exist.” This sentence is false, but it seems possible for it to be true (for example, during the Jurassic Period). But its tenseless translation is “No sentence tokens exist simultaneous with this utterance,” which is a self-contradiction and therefore not even possibly true. Therefore, these sentences cannot have the same meaning. In general, anyone with a mastery of English understands that tensed sentences do not imply the existence of tokens of those sentences. It is not part of the meaning of a tensed sentence that it refer to itself.

For all these reasons the Old Tenseless Theory of Language has been universally abandoned by defenders of the static view of time. Linguistic tense is ineliminable. Premise (3) of the argument is therefore no longer contested by static time theorists.

The New Tenseless Theory of Language

Having retreated from the translatability claim, de-tensers have recently regrouped behind the New Tenseless Theory of Language, which has been brilliantly formulated and defended by the Cambridge philosopher D. H. Mellor.⁷ Mellor is quite insistent on the fact that tensed sentences cannot be translated into tenseless sentences. But he does think that tensed sentences can be given tenseless truth conditions. To give the truth conditions of a sentence is to state the conditions under which the sentence is true. Mellor holds that a present-tense sentence token is true if and only if that token occurs at the time of the event it describes; a past-tense sentence token is true if and only if that token occurs at a specified time later than the event described; and a future-tense token is true if and only if the token occurs at a specified time earlier than the relevant event. So, for example, take the sentence “It is now 1980” and call some token of this sentence “S.” S is true if and only if S occurs in 1980. “It is now 1980” obviously does not mean “S occurs in 1980.” Nevertheless, “S occurs in 1980” does state the tenseless truth conditions for S. That is to say, a token of the sentence “It is now 1980” is true just in case that token is uttered in 1980. At any other time it would be false. But if it occurs in 1980, that token is true.

Now Mellor takes the tenseless truth conditions to be what makes the tensed sentences true. Since those conditions are tenseless, no tensed facts are necessary to make tensed sentences true. All that is needed is tenseless facts.

Now all this still does not serve to show that tensed facts are dispensable, as the static time theorist must show if he is to undercut premise (4). Mellor recognizes this, and he goes on to argue that the tenseless sentences stating the truth conditions of tensed sentences also give us the rules governing when we should use those tensed tokens. For example, anyone who knows the truth conditions of “It is now 1980” will know when to use a token of that sentence, namely, only during 1980. But how, we may wonder, can we know when to use such a token unless we can grasp the tensed fact that it is now 1980? We all have a certain now-awareness, which Mellor calls the presence (or better, presentness) of experience, which must be conjoined to any rules for using tensed sentence tokens if we are to use them successfully. Indeed, Mellor recognizes that “This curious phenomenon, the experienced temporal presence of experience, is the crux of the tensed view of time, and the tenseless camp must somehow explain it away. . . . Without a tenseless account of it, tenseless truth conditions on their own will never dispose of tensed facts.”⁸ Mellor therefore argues that although we observe our experience to be present, it in fact is not.

So as not to bite off more than we can chew, let us set to the side for the time being Mellor’s denial of the presentness of experience and focus on his claim that only tenseless facts are required to make tensed sentences true.⁹ There are a number of reasons to think that Mellor’s New Tenseless Theory of Language is no more successful than the Old Tenseless Theory in rendering tensed facts superfluous.

First, the New Tenseless Theory violates the laws of logic. Because Mellor is offering truth conditions for sentence tokens, not types, two different tokens of the same sentence type must have different truth conditions. For example, imagine two people simultaneously saying, “It is now 1980.” Call one token of this sentence R and the other S. On Mellor’s analysis the truth conditions of R and S are as follows:¹⁰

(R) “It is now 1980” ≡ R occurs in 1980



(S) “It is now 1980” ≡ S occurs in 1980

The problem with this analysis is that while R necessarily implies S, “R occurs in 1980” does not necessarily imply “S occurs in 1980”— and yet R is said to be logically equivalent to “R occurs in 1980” and S logically equivalent to “S occurs in 1980”! Worse, if R is logically equivalent to S and S is logically equivalent to “S occurs in 1980,” then R should be logically equivalent to“S occurs in 1980,” which it obviously is not. Moreover, if the only facts stated by R and S are the tenseless facts constituting their respective truth conditions, then since these truth conditions are not the same fact, R and S do not state the same fact, which is absurd. Thus, Mellor’s account of the truth conditions of tensed sentences is logically incoherent.

All of this implies that Mellor has failed to state properly the truth conditions of tensed sentences. Rather what he has given us is a tenseless rule for when a token can be truly uttered:

R is truly uttered ≡ R occurs in 1980



S is truly uttered ≡ S occurs in 1980

Such a tenseless rule of use is unproblematic; but it does nothing to suggest that R or S themselves have tenseless truth conditions.

The advocate of the dynamic theory of time may offer instead tensed truth conditions of tensed sentences. In order to do so, one must challenge the assumption that when it is said, “R is true if and only if . . .” the “is” is tenseless. If the “is” is present tense, then we shall have truth conditions for R’s being presently true or true now. When we state tensed truth conditions, we find that we are employing the standard schema for truth Tp ≡ p.¹¹ Thus “The Battle of Waterloo occurred in 1815” is (presently) true if and only if the Battle of Waterloo occurred in 1815. This just is a view of truth as correspondence with reality. What all this implies is that there are tensed states of affairs that are actual now, or, in other words, that there are tensed facts.

Second, the New Tenseless Theory offers no coherent account of tensed sentences which are never tokened. This problem is a holdover from the Old Tenseless Theory. What truth conditions are to be given for the sentence “There are no sentence tokens”? On Mellor’s analysis such a sentence cannot possibly be true; but it seems obvious that everyone could be silent for a minute!

Mellor’s colleague Jeremy Butterfield has an acute awareness of the problem this poses for the New Tenseless Theory.¹² He is embarrassed by the fact that on such an analysis something not talked about during its existence is never present, since there are no present-tense truths about it. Equally awkward is the fact that this thing could be future or past, if people predicted or recalled its existence, even though it is never present. Something else which was talked about during its existence but was unanticipated and immediately forgotten is present while it exists, but never future or past. Butterfield tries to remedy this defect by allowing untokened sentences to be true or to express truths. But he will not admit tensed facts. His view seems to be that tensed sentences are true at some times and false at others and that tenseless truth conditions can be given for a sentence which states at what times a tensed sentence is true. For some tensed sentence S we can formulate a tenseless sentence T stating precisely when S is true. Thus Butterfield’s account only gives us truth conditions for tenseless sentences such as “S is true in the Jurassic Period,” but not truth conditions for S itself. If S itself is true, though untokened, only during the Jurassic Period, then S states a tensed fact, and Butterfield has failed to provide tenseless truth conditions for it. Thus, in attempting to remedy the defective token-reflexive analysis of the New Theory, Butterfield has inadvertently backed himself into affirming the reality of tensed facts.

Third, the New Tenseless Theory confuses truth conditions with truth makers of tensed sentences. Protagonists of the New Tenseless Theory of Language consistently take the fact stated by a tensed sentence’s tenseless truth conditions to be what makes the tensed sentence true. But such an assumption is based on a confusion. Stating truth conditions is a semantic exercise aimed at specifying the conditions under which a sentence has a determinate truth value. But there is no reason to think that what serves as a sentence’s truth conditions is also what makes the sentence true. One could lay down adequate truth conditions for any tensed sentence S by stating, for example, that S is true if and only if God believes what S states. But God’s believing what S states is not what makes S true; indeed, quite the opposite: God believes what S states because S is true.

Now Mellor might respond by contending that truth conditions which also provide a rule for using tensed sentences do give us the facts which make those sentences true. But I think there are good counter-examples to this claim. Consider, for example, the truth conditions typically given for modal sentences—sentences about what is necessary or possible. According to the usual account, a statement is necessarily true if and only if it is true in all logically possible worlds, and a statement is possibly true if and only if it is true in some possible world. Given these truth conditions, I also understand how to use such modal sentences. But the semantics of possible worlds tells me nothing about what makes modal sentences true. As Alvin Plantinga, whose book The Nature of Necessity has become a classic in this area, explains,

we can’t sensibly explain necessity as truth in all possible worlds; nor can we say that p’s being true in all possible worlds is what makes p necessary. It may still be extremely useful to note the equivalence of p is necessary and p is true in all possible worlds: it is useful in the way diagrams and definitions are in mathematics; it enables us to see connections, entertain propositions and resolve questions that could otherwise be seen, entertained and resolved only with the greatest difficulty if at all.¹³

Thus the semantics of possible worlds constitutes a clear counter-example to the New Tenseless Theory’s assumption that truth conditions which provide a rule for using tensed sentences give us the facts which make those sentences true.

Consider as well the semantics for counterfactual sentences about what would be the case or might be the case, if something else were the case. According to the usual analysis, a sentence about what would be the case is true if and only if in all possible worlds most similar to the actual world in which the antecedent clause of the counterfactual sentence is true, the consequent clause is also true. Thus the sentence “If Buchanan had won the Republican nomination in 1992, he would have lost the election” is true if and only if in all possible worlds most similar to the actual world in which Buchanan wins the nomination, he loses the election. A sentence about what might be the case is true if and only if the consequent clause is true in some of the most similar worlds in which the antecedent is true. These truth conditions also give us the rule for how to use such counterfactual statements. But once again, they do nothing to explain what makes the counterfactual statement true. Plantinga remarks,

. . . we can’t look to similarity, among possible worlds, as explaining counterfactuality, or as founding or grounding it. (Indeed, any founding or grounding in the neighborhood goes in the opposite direction.) We can’t say that the truth of A ‘ C is explained by the relevant statements about possible worlds, or that the relevant similarity relation is what makes it true.¹⁴

Wholly apart from these counter-examples, the deeper philosophical issue here is the difference between conditions and grounds. Truth conditions are purely logical conditions and are not meant to constitute grounds for something else. For example, “Socrates died” and “Xanthippe [Socrates’s wife] became a widow” are logically equivalent, but it would be completely wrong-headed to say that the former is made true by the latter or that the latter is the ground of the former. Thus, stating truth conditions is not the same thing as stating the grounds of truth. Even if the New Tenseless Theory of Language were correct in its statement of the truth conditions of tensed sentences, I see no reason to think that these disclose to us the facts which make the sentences true. On the contrary, if tensed sentences have truth makers, it seems plausible that it is the tensed facts expressed by tensed sentences which make them true, regardless of what truth conditions might be offered for them.

Remarkably, in the recently revised version of his book, Mellor himself abandons the New Tenseless Theory of Language under the force of objections such as the above.¹⁵ But Mellor is not ready to admit the existence of tensed facts; instead he proposes another theory, what he calls the Indexical Tenseless Theory, to replace the untenable New Tenseless Theory. In proposing this new theory, Mellor makes it clear that his interest is not so much in truth conditions of tensed sentences as in their truth makers. Mellor is actually prepared to admit that there are tensed facts corresponding to what tensed sentences report. For example, corresponding to the tensed sentence “Jim races tomorrow” is the tensed fact that Jim races tomorrow.¹⁶ This is a striking concession on Mellor’s part, for at face value it grants precisely what defenders of the tensed theory of time have been saying. But Mellor maintains that the concession is merely apparent, for he insists that these facts are not what makes the tensed sentences true. What makes them true are exclusively tenseless facts, and so the argument for a tensed theory of time fails.

The Achilles’ heel of the New Tenseless Theory was its reliance on sentence tokens as the bearers of truth. So what will Mellor substitute in their place as the truth bearers in his Indexical Theory? The answer is not at all clear, but it seems that sentence types rather than sentence tokens are the primary truth bearers. This gets around the problem of how there can be truths such as “There are no sentence tokens.” For even if no token of a sentence type ever exists, the sentence type itself is a kind of abstract entity that exists regardless. So what makes tensed sentence types true if it is not the tensed facts which they report?

Mellor claims that any tensed sentence type S about an event E is made true at any time t by the fact that t precedes (or follows) E by the same amount of time as S says the present precedes (or follows) E.¹⁷ So, for example, if S = Jim will race tomorrow, then what makes S true on, say, June 1, 1999, is the fact that June 1, 1999 is one day before Jim’s race. But that fact—June 1, 1999 is one day before Jim’s race—is a tenseless fact. Thus, tensed facts are not needed to make tensed sentences true. So the ineliminability of tense from language does not require the existence of tensed facts in the robust sense of truth makers.

Mellor’s theory just assumes that tensed sentences have truth makers, which is a controversial assumption.¹⁸ But let that pass. Even granted that assumption, Mellor’s theory does nothing to show that tensed sentences do not have tensed truth makers as well as tenseless truth makers. Truth-maker theorists universally acknowledge that there is no one-to-one correspondence between truths and truth makers—some truths may have multiple truth makers. So the question is whether the tensed facts which Mellor now admits exist might not be truth makers. In order to defeat the argument from the ineliminability of tense, Mellor must show that tensed facts are not truth makers. For even the demonstration that tenseless facts are truth makers of tensed sentences does not prove that tensed facts are not their truth makers as well. If tensed facts exist, then it is very difficult to see why the sentences corresponding to them would not be true in virtue of such facts. Since he now concedes the existence of tensed facts, Mellor must show them to be so effete that tensed sentences are not, so to speak, overdetermined by the facts, rendered true by both tensed facts and tenseless facts. That he has not done.

But Mellor’s revised theory has even deeper problems than that. The strength of the New Tenseless Theory was that it claimed to state the truth-conditions—and even, in Mellor’s mind, the truth makers—of any tensed sentence, period. But Mellor’s revised theory does not attempt to do either one. We are left wondering as to the truth conditions of S. Mellor’s revised account cannot be construed in truth conditional terms, for then we should have:

S is true at t ≡ t precedes (or follows) E by the same amount of time as S says the present precedes (or follows) E

Here we have truth conditions, not for S but for “S is true at t.” These are truth conditions of a tenseless sentence, not of a tensed sentence! Considered as giving us S’s truth maker, the indexed account again fails to tell us what makes S true—it only tells us what supposedly makes S true at t. But as we saw in our discussion of tensed truth conditions, we want to know what makes (present tense) S true, period. We want to know, not what makes Jim races tomorrow true on June 1, but what makes it true that Jim races tomorrow or that Jim is racing. If tensed sentence types need truth makers, then it is tensed facts which are the truth makers of such tensed sentence types. For if there are no tensed truth makers, then it is inexplicable why S is true—not true at t, mind you, but simply true.

Defenders of the tenseless view of time thus appear to have failed in their attempt to undermine the reality of tensed facts. Neither the Old Tenseless Theory of Language, the New Tenseless Theory, nor Mellor’s most recent Indexical Tenseless Theory succeeds in sloughing off the reality of tensed facts. On the contrary, it seems plausible that an adequate treatment of the truth conditions or truth makers of tensed sentences requires the reality of tensed facts.

But the defender of static time has one last card to play: De-tensers frequently claim that a parallel argument for the reality of spatial “tenses” can be constructed and that since spatial “tenses” obviously do not exist, the argument leading to such a conclusion must be fallacious. Since the arguments are entirely parallel, de-tensers conclude that it is fallacious to infer that either temporal or spatial tenses are objective.

De-tensers note that the spatial indexical “here” is entirely parallel to the temporal indexical “now.” Spatial locations relative to “here,” such as ten miles north of here or ten miles south of here, are analogous to future and past times. Moreover, some of the most memorable examples of “the essential indexical” concern spatial indexicals which serve to locate oneself. For example, someone lost in the stacks of the Stanford University library knows he is “here” but wants to know where “here” is. Similarly, someone looking at a map of the library can know that the circulation desk is on the second floor, but he will not try to check out his books unless he believes the circulation desk is “here.” So spatial indexicals are every bit as ineliminable and indispensable as temporal indexicals. Yet no one believes that spatial “tenses” are real, that there is an objective “here” in the world independent of conscious beings. “Here” is just a subjective perspective on a world which exists in space independently of such perspectives. The same is true of “now” and temporal tenses.

This is a powerful rejoinder, but it seems to me that the theorist of dynamic time has the resources to meet it. One of the failings of this rejoinder is that it concerns indexical words only. But, as we have seen, tense in language is far from limited to indexical words alone. The dynamic time theorist could freely admit that indexical words express ego-centric perspectives. Just as we would not hold it to have been true at some time t during the Jurassic period at some location l on the North American continent that “A trachodon is laying her eggs here,” so we would not hold it to have been true that “A trachodon is now laying her eggs.” “Now” like “here” expresses the viewpoint of a conscious subject. But that does not imply that tense is subjective. For it was true at t, l that “A trachodon is laying her eggs,” not merely that “A trachodon lays her eggs at t, l.” The fact that indexicals are ego-centric does not imply that the present tense is unreal.

Secondly, the dynamic time theorist can eliminate spatial “tenses” by providing a reductive analysis of them. The first intimations of how to eliminate spatially perspectival facts may be found in Bertrand Russell’s reflections on the “this-ness” of experience.¹⁹ “This” and “that” are indexical words called demonstratives, which we use to designate one thing rather than another. Russell observed that instead of regarding “this-ness” as fundamental, we could analyze it in terms of “I-now.” For example, “this” is what I am now designating. In this case the “I-now” becomes fundamental and irreducible. The advocate of dynamic time can utilize this same insight to reductively analyze “here” in terms of the location of “I-now.” “Here” is where I am now located. We can even trade in “now” for the simple present tense: “Here” is where I am located. On this analysis, spatial locations as given by coordinates (such as longitude and latitude) are objective, but spatial perspectives such as “here” and “there” are not. Because the “I-now” is irreducible, this analysis entails the objective existence of the self and the present. While such an analysis may not be congenial to reductive materialists, who want to get rid of the self, it is an analysis wholly in accord with Christian theism, which regards selves as genuine agents, God Himself being the paradigm example.

This analysis does raise a further difficulty, however. It seems to imply that there are private, first-person truths accessible only to individual selves, for example, that I am Napoleon Bonaparte. The only person who could grasp this private truth was Napoleon himself. Although a few philosophers hold that there are such truths, most do not. It seems bizarre to think that when someone says to me, “Tell Jan that I’m coming at 3:00,” I cannot really grasp or communicate this fact, but can only tell Jan some other, quite different fact—for example, that Elaine is coming at 3:00. Moreover, if there are such private truths, then God is not omniscient, since He does not know, for instance, that He Himself is Napoleon. It is therefore desirable to find an account of the self and the present which does not commit us to the existence of private truths.

One alternative would be to hold that the factual content of sentences containing indexical words is indexical-free, “I” serving to express the individual essence of the speaker and “now” the present tense.²⁰ Thus, the factual content of the sentence “I am now eating lunch,” when uttered in a specific context, would be something like Jonathan Kvanvig is eating lunch (letting the proper name stand in for Kvanvig’s individual essence). When Kvanvig grasps this content, he expresses it with the first-person “I” because he is Kvanvig. But when we grasp this content we express it differently. Thus, we know the same truth, but because real, distinct selves exist, those selves grasp this truth differently. We could even go so far as to eliminate tense altogether from the factual content expressed by a tensed sentence, insisting, however, that because tense is real and we exist in the present, we grasp directly truths referring to the time which is present and indirectly truths referring to other times. The self and the present are thus real even if they are not, as such, part of the factual content expressed by a sentence.

A second alternative would be to construe factual content in terms of a person’s ascribing properties to himself.²¹ Corresponding to the factual content expressed by a sentence one can conceive of a property of being in a world of that sort, which one ascribes to himself. For example, instead of holding that I believe a certain fact expressed by the sentence “David Lewis teaches at Princeton,” we can hold that I ascribe to myself the property of inhabiting a world in which David Lewis teaches at Princeton. But when David Lewis asserts, “I teach at Princeton,” he ascribes to himself the property of teaching at Princeton. Similarly, when one ascribes to oneself properties involving reference to the present time, one expresses this in the present tense or with indexicals such as “now.” One need not hold that all sentences must be analyzed in terms of the self-ascription of properties; but one could hold that in the case of knowledge de se and de praesenti, at least, what one is doing is ascribing appropriate properties to oneself at the present time, not accessing private facts.

Either of these accounts seems viable, and no doubt others could be formulated as well, so we need not endorse one. The presence of such viable accounts suggests that one’s commitment to the reality of the self and the present does not imply commitment to privately accessible facts. Therefore, the last objection on the part of de-tensers to the reality of tensed facts collapses.

In conclusion, it does seem to me that the linguistic argument for the objective reality of tense is a good one. Tensed sentences appear to express tensed facts, and neither the Old nor the New nor the Indexical Tenseless Theory of Language has been able to dispense with them. By positing the objective reality of the self and the present, the partisan of dynamic time can provide a reductive analysis of spatial indexicals which does not commit him to private facts. It therefore follows that unless better arguments can be marshaled in support of the static view of time, the reality of tensed facts and, accordingly, the dynamic theory of time should be accepted.

EXPOSITION

We have seen that tense in language is plausibly taken to be a reflection of tense in the world. But wholly apart from language, we experience the reality of tense in a variety of ways that are so evident and so pervasive that the belief in the objective reality of past, present, and future is a universal feature of human experience. Here we move from the philosophy of language into the field of phenomenology, which seeks to provide a description of human experience.

Phenomenological analyses of temporal consciousness have emphasized the centrality of past, present, and future to our experience of time. In his classic analysis of temporal consciousness, the great phenomenologist Edmund Husserl described our experience of time in terms of remembering the past and anticipating the future, both anchored in consciousness of the “now.” The transformation of a “now”-consciousness to a past-consciousness and its replacement by a new “now”-consciousness, says Husserl, “is part of the essence of time consciousness.”²²

Similarly, the psychologist William Friedman, who has made a career of the study of our consciousness of time, reports that “the division between past, present, and future so deeply permeates our experience that it is hard to imagine its absence.”²³ He says that we have “an irresistible tendency to believe in a present. Most of us find quite startling the claim of some physicists and philosophers that the present has no special status in the physical world, that there is only a sequence of times, that the past, present, and future are only distinguishable in human consciousness.”²⁴

Consequently virtually all philosophers of time and space, even those who hold to a static view of time, admit that the view of the common man is that time involves a real distinction between past, present, and future. One advocate of the static view grumps that the dynamic understanding of time is so deeply ingrained in us that it seems “programmed by original sin”!²⁵ The advocate of the dynamic view of time may plausibly contend that our experience of tense ought to be accepted as veridical, or trustworthy, unless we are given some more powerful reason for denying it.

The dynamic time theorist might formulate an argument to the effect that the objective reality of tense is the best explanation of our experience of tense. But it seems to me that our belief in the reality of tense is much more fundamental than such an argument suggests. We do not adopt the belief in an objective difference between the past, present, and future in an attempt to explain our experience of the temporal world. Rather our belief in this case is what epistemologists call “a properly basic belief.”²⁶

A basic belief is a belief which is not believed on the basis of some underlying belief but is rather a foundational belief which we simply form in certain situations. For example, when I look out the window and form the belief “There is a tree,” I am definitely not reasoning, “I am receiving certain sensory stimuli such that a tree is appearing to me. The best explanation of this sensory phenomenon is that there really is a tree and that therefore I am having this experience.” Rather, in such a situation, I just automatically and immediately form the belief “There is a tree.”

Now almost any belief could be held in a basic way by someone, but that does not mean that just any belief can be properly basic. In order to be properly basic, a belief must be grounded in the appropriate circumstances. Otherwise the belief is irrational. For example, if I look at my office wall and form the belief “There is a tree,” then such a belief is not properly basic for me, since it is not grounded in appropriate circumstances. But if I am in the circumstances of looking at a tree, then such a belief is properly basic for me.

A little reflection discloses that the vast majority of our beliefs are properly basic beliefs. Perceptual beliefs, memory beliefs, and beliefs based on testimony are just some of the classes of beliefs which we hold to in a properly basic way. Properly basic beliefs can differ from one another with respect to how deeply ingrained they are and how strongly they are held. A deeply ingrained belief is one which, if abandoned, would force us to change many other beliefs as well. A strongly held belief is one which I hold very tenaciously, being unwilling to give it up lightly.

It is important to understand that properly basic beliefs are defeasible, that is to say, they can be shown to be false. For example, while visiting Disney World I might form the belief “There is a tree,” which would be a properly basic belief for me in those circumstances, until I discover upon close inspection that the “tree” is a mere simulation. In such a case we say that my belief has been defeated. If I am to remain rational, I must now abandon the original belief that I saw a tree.

A belief’s being properly basic thus implies that I am justified in holding to that belief unless and until it is defeated. We may say that such a belief is justified at face value (prima facie). For example, take the belief that “The external world is real.” It is possible that you are really a brain in a vat of chemicals, being stimulated with electrodes by some mad scientist to believe that you are sitting there reading this book. Indeed, there is no way to prove this hypothesis wrong. But that does not imply that your belief in the reality of the external world is unjustified. On the contrary, it is a properly basic belief grounded in your experience and is as such justified until some defeater comes along. This belief is not defeated by the mere possibility that you are a brain in a vat. For there is no warrant for thinking that you are, in fact, a brain in a vat. Indeed, our belief in the reality of the external world is so deeply ingrained and strongly held that any successful defeater of this belief would have to possess enormous warrant. In the absence of any successful defeater, you are perfectly justified in taking your experience of the external world to be veridical.

Now the advocate of a dynamic view of time may argue similarly concerning our belief in the past, present, and future. Belief in the objective reality of tense is a properly basic belief which is universal among mankind. It therefore follows that anyone who denies this belief (and who is aware that he has no good defeaters of that belief) is irrational, for such a person fails to hold to a belief which is for him properly basic.

Sometimes advocates of a tenseless view of time assert that our experience of past, present, and future need not be taken as veridical, since we can imagine a universe exactly like this one which is a four-dimensional block universe containing individuals whose mental states correspond exactly to our mental states in this world. “But then surely our copies in the block universe would have the same experiences that we do—in which case they are not distinctive of a dynamic universe after all. Things would seem this way, even if we ourselves were elements of a block universe.”²⁷ But this is like arguing that because a brain in a vat would have the same experiences of the external world that we do, therefore we no longer have any grounds for regarding our experiences as veridical! In the absence of some sort of defeater of beliefs grounded by such experiences, these experiences do provide warrant for those beliefs.

We can formulate this argument as follows:

1. Belief in the objective reality of the distinction between past, present, and future is properly basic.



2. If our belief in the objective reality of the distinction between past, present, and future is properly basic, then we are prima facie justified in holding this belief.



3. Therefore, we are prima facie justified in holding our belief in the objective reality of the distinction between past, present, and future.

Since premise (2) is true by definition of “properly basic belief,” the only disputable premise is (1).

CRITIQUE

The Presentness of Experience

Let us examine more closely our experience of time in order to evaluate premise (1). To begin with the most obvious, we experience events as present. Our belief that events are happening presently is really no different than our belief that they are happening—and this latter belief is a basic belief grounded in our perceptual experience.

D. H. Mellor, as a proponent of the static view of time, does not believe that there really is a present. Therefore, he says, we cannot, despite appearances, be experiencing it. Mellor thus goes to great lengths to explain away our experience of the present.

First, he argues that we do not really observe the tense of events.²⁸ He gives an illustration of observing astronomical events through a telescope. When I look at the stars, I seem to be observing the events as presently happening; but we know that they actually occurred millions of years ago. Thus, what I see is the order in which events occurred, but my observations do not tell me the tense of the events. Therefore, when we think that we are observing any event to be present, we are simply confused. We do not observe the event itself to be present; rather we observe our experience of the event to be present.

Now it seems to me that Mellor’s objection is ineffective against the argument as we have framed it. For clearly I do not form a belief such as “The phone is ringing” by inferring it from a more foundational belief such as “My experience of the phone’s ringing is present.” Typically, I do not form any belief like the latter at all. My beliefs about the tense of events is not inferred, but basic. As for the illustration of events viewed through a telescope, all that proves is that my beliefs about the tense of events is defeasible and sometimes wrong. One might as well argue that perceptual beliefs are not properly basic because things viewed through a microscope are observed to be larger than they are! Just because our sense perceptions are sometimes mistaken is no reason to think that we do not perceive things. In the same way, mistaken observations of the presentness of certain events do not prove that we make no such observations.²⁹ In most cases, the events we observe fall within the limits of the specious present, so that our observations of events as present are veridical and our judgments to that effect properly basic.

In any case, Mellor admits that we do observe our experiences to be present. This is the so-called presentness of experience. Even if I can be mistaken about the presentness of a supernova observed through a telescope, I cannot be mistaken about the presentness of my experience of observing the supernova. If I observe my experiences to be present, am I not observing the tense of these mental events?

No, says Mellor, for “although we observe our experience to be present, it really isn’t.”³⁰ This is a paradoxical statement. Mellor admits that when I make the judgment that my experience is present, I cannot be mistaken. He writes,

So judging my experience to be present is much like my judging it to be painless. On the one hand, the judgment is not one I have to make. . . . But on the other hand, if I do make it, I am bound to be right, just as when I judge my experience to be painless. The presence of experience . . . is something of which one’s awareness is infallible.

      . . . No matter who I am or whenever I judge my experience to be present, that judgment will be true.³¹

But if my observation of the presentness of my experience is analogous to my observation of whether my experiences are painful, if I am bound to be right in judging my experience to be present, if my awareness of the presentness of my experience is infallible, if my judgment that my experience is present will be true every time, then how can it be the case that, as Mellor says, “it really isn’t”? If my belief that “My experience of observing the supernova is present” is indefeasible, as Mellor admits, then how can that experience not be present, even if the supernova itself is not?

Mellor’s answer is that, while the belief that one’s experience is present may have important cognitive significance, nonetheless the factual content of that belief is a tautology and is therefore trivial.³² He is thinking here of his account of the tenseless truth conditions of tensed sentences. Mellor maintains that the belief

A. The experiences which I am now having possess the property of being present

is just true by definition on the New Tenseless Theory of Language. For the truth conditions of (A) are given by

B. The experiences which I have at the time of the token of (A) possess the property of existing at the time of the token of (A).

But (B) is trivially true, says Mellor, a mere tautology. Therefore, although (A) is true, its factual content, as disclosed by (B), does not imply the objective reality of presentness.

This response by Mellor is multiply flawed. First, Mellor’s tautology is self-constructed, for he stipulates that it is the experiences which I am now having which are judged to be present. But there is no reason to describe one’s experiences as those which one is now having. The beliefs in question are not like (A); rather they are like

A’. My experience of seeing the supernova is present,

which is not tautologous.

Second, even (A) can be read in a way that is not tautologous. Let the phrase “the experience which I am now having” pick out a specific, unique experience such as observing the supernova. In that case, the ascription of presentness to that particular experience out of all the experiences one ever has is not trivial or true by definition.

Third, even if (A) is trivial, that does not imply that the presentness of experience is trivial. It may be trivial to assert that “My present experiences are present” or that “My present experiences are experiences.” But that does nothing to explain away the fact that one does have present experiences or to defeat the belief in the presentness of one’s experiences.

Fourth, stating tenseless truth conditions for one’s belief in the presentness of one’s experience does not constitute even a prima facie defeater of that belief. Such truth conditions are just irrelevant to the proper basicality of that belief. For the object of one’s belief is not the fact which is stated as the tenseless truth conditions of what one believes. In order for that to be the case the statement of the truth conditions would have to have the same meaning as the statement of the tensed belief, which is to lapse back into the Old Tenseless Theory of Language. Since they are not synonymous, the triviality of the statement of the truth conditions does not imply the triviality of the tensed belief. Nor is there any reason to think that the factual content of the tensed belief is given exhaustively in the tenseless truth conditions.

Finally, fifth, we have already seen (in the previous section) the shortcomings of Mellor’s New Tenseless Theory of Language. Since his account of the presentness of experience is founded on the New Tenseless Theory, the demise of that theory also pulls under Mellor’s account of the presentness of experience.

It therefore seems to me that Mellor has not provided a successful defeater of our belief that our experiences are present. Not only does such a belief seem to be properly basic, but it even seems to be indefeasibly true.

Our Differential Attitudes toward Past and Future

A second way in which we experience the reality of tense is exhibited by our attitudes toward the past and the future. We recall past events with nostalgia or regret, depending on whether they are remembered as pleasant or unpleasant, whereas we look forward to future events with either dread or anticipation. The beliefs that these attitudes express are tensed beliefs. As the late Oxford tense logician A. N. Prior once remarked, when we say, “Thank goodness that’s over!” we certainly do not mean “Thank goodness the date of that thing’s conclusion is June 15, 1954!” or “Thank goodness that thing’s conclusion is simultaneous with this utterance!”—for why should anyone thank goodness for that?³³ Prior’s point is that such attitudes cannot concern tenseless facts but are about tensed facts. The further point is that it is entirely rational to have such attitudes. Therefore, the tensed beliefs evinced by these attitudes must be rational as well. If it is rational for me to be relieved that my visit to the dentist is past, then my belief that my visit is past is also rational.

On the static theory of time, feelings of relief and anticipation must be ultimately regarded as irrational, since events really are not past or future. Yet one can safely say that no static time theorist has ever succeeded in divesting himself of such feelings. Indeed, anyone who did succeed in ridding himself of such feelings and the tensed beliefs they express would cease to be human.

In response to Prior, Mellor and MacBeath concede that such attitudes do express tensed beliefs; but they again have recourse to the New Tenseless Theory of Language to strip those beliefs of any tensed factual content. Mellor writes, “Thus I thank goodness my headache is over not because it is over but because I believe it to be over: and the content of this belief is fixed by its token-reflexive truth conditions. . . .”³⁴ Thus, my truly believing that my headache is over does not imply that my headache is objectively past.

Now certainly Mellor and MacBeath are correct that what my attitudes immediately express are tensed beliefs, not tensed facts. For the dreaded event may be avoided and so never come to pass at all. Or I might be relieved about something due to a false report. All this proves is that one’s tensed beliefs are defeasible. But many times my tensed beliefs are correct. Indeed, sometimes they are indefeasibly correct, as when I believe that the pain I felt is over. And, as we have seen, contrary to Mellor and MacBeath, neither the factual content nor the truth of my tensed beliefs is fixed by the tenseless facts which are stated as their truth conditions according to the New Tenseless Theory. In other words, the question comes down once more to the presentness of experience. When I feel relief, what I am relieved about can be analyzed as a complex fact involving the beliefs that (i) my experience is present and (ii) some event is earlier than the present. I can be mistaken about (ii), but I cannot be mistaken about (i), and thus the objectivity of tense remains.

There is a further feature of our attitudes toward the past and future that deserves to be highlighted, namely, the difference in how we regard an event depending on its pastness or futurity. An unpleasant experience which lies in the future occasions feelings of dread; but that very same experience, once past, evokes feelings of relief. On a dynamic theory of time these different attitudes are grounded in the reality of temporal becoming. A future event has yet to exist and will be present; but a past event no longer exists and was present. Therefore, it is rational to have different feelings about these events. But on a static theory of time, this difference in attitude toward the past and future is groundless and, hence, irrational. As philosopher of time George Schlesinger points out, on the static theory of time there is no more difference between an event’s being located one hour later versus one hour earlier than now, than there is in an event’s being located one mile to the right versus one mile to the left of here, for neither “now” nor “here” is objective.³⁵ Whether past or future, both events are equally real; there is no temporal becoming; nor am I moving toward one event and away from the other; and the distinction between past and future is purely subjective. Therefore, it just makes no sense to look upon these events differently. And yet, as Schlesinger observes, such a differential concern is a universal human experience.

Think, for example, of the difference in one’s attitude toward one’s birth and one’s death. On the static theory of time the period of personal non- existence which lies after one’s death is of no more significance than the period of personal non-existence which lies before one’s birth. And yet we celebrate birthdays whereas we typically dread dying, a dread that runs so deep that one’s death, wholly in contrast to one’s birth, seems to put a question mark behind the value of life itself. Many existentialist philosophers have said that life becomes absurd in light of “my death”; but no one has said this with regard to “my birth.”

Defenders of static time have naturally been reluctant to dismiss as irrational our differing attitudes toward past and future events and so have instead tried to find some basis for this difference in the static theory. For example, Nathan Oaklander, an ardent defender of static time, insists that such a difference is rational because on the static theory time is asymmetric, that is to say, it has a direction as determined by the ordering of events according to the relations earlier than/later than.³⁶ Oaklander thinks that it makes all the difference in the world whether an event is later than one’s location in time or earlier than one’s location in time.

But it is evident, I think, that on a static theory of time the mere asymmetry of time is not an adequate substitute for temporal becoming. Stripped of all tense, the relations of earlier than/later than with respect to some event no more justify differing attitudes on my part than would the relations to the right of/to the left of. Indeed, on the static theory of time, there are really two directions to time: one the “earlier than” direction and the other the “later than” direction. In the absence of temporal becoming it is wholly arbitrary how these directions are laid on the series of events. The two arrows of time could be turned 180 degrees without any inconsistency with the facts. Although some scientists try to appeal to the laws of thermodynamics or other physical processes to establish “the” single arrow of time, philosopher of science Lawrence Sklar points out that all such attempts presuppose a prior choice of direction—for example, that the direction of entropy increase is the “later than” direction.³⁷ In the absence of temporal becoming, such a choice is wholly arbitrary. We could have called the direction of entropy increase “earlier than” if we had wanted to. Thus, “earlier” and “later” simply do not have the significance on a static theory of time that they do on a dynamic theory.

Our differing attitudes toward past and future events serve to underline how deeply ingrained and how strongly held our tensed beliefs are. If the static theory of time is correct, feelings of relief, nostalgia, dread, and anticipation are all irrational. Since such feelings are ineradicable, the static theory would condemn us all to irrationality. In the absence of any defeater for our belief in the objective distinction between past, present, and future, such a belief remains properly basic and the feelings they evoke entirely appropriate.

The Experience of Temporal Becoming

A third and final feature of our temporal experience which deserves mention is our experience of temporal becoming. The fact of temporal becoming is as obvious as the existence of the external world. For we experience that world as a continuous flux. Thus our experience of the external world is an experience of temporal becoming. But the reality of temporal becoming is even more evident to us than the reality of the external world. For in the inner life of the mind we experience a continual change of the contents of consciousness, and this stream of consciousness, even in the absence of any apprehension of the external world, makes evident to us the reality of temporal becoming. In the flux of experience there is constant and ineluctable becoming. It is therefore hard to imagine anything more obvious to us than the reality of temporal becoming.

The belief in temporal becoming comes to expression in certain experiences that are common to human beings. For example, who among us has not wished that it were some other time? A child anticipating Christmas morning might exclaim, “Oh, I wish it were Christmas!” Or someone going through hard times might think back on better times and say, “I wish it were 1968!” As Schlesinger points out, although there is no chance of such a wish’s being fulfilled, there is no lack of clarity as to what is being wished: “Anybody familiar with my plight would fully sympathize with me and unfailingly grasp what feature of the universe I should like to be different from what it is: instead of the NOW being at t₁, I should like it to be at t0.”³⁸ In such experiences we wish that some other moment in time were present rather than the one which is. We thereby presuppose the reality of temporal becoming, since our wish expresses our belief in a changing and objective present.

Since on the static theory of time there is no objective present, any informed person (including the static time theorist) who expresses such wishes is irrational. The best that the defender of tenseless time can do to make sense of such experiences is to offer tenseless substitutes for these wishes, such as “I wish Christmas were celebrated on December 1 instead of December 25,” or “I wish the events of the world were reconstituted so that the world would appear to be the way it looked in 1968.” But these things are obviously not at all what we are wishing for! The tenseless time theorist thus seems obliged to say that our real wishes, which are probably universal experiences of mankind, are just irrational.

Not so, retorts Oaklander. He acknowledges that “such wishes are meaningful” and admits that if the defender of the static view of time is committed to regarding such wishes as devoid of meaning, then there is “something wrong” with the static view of time.³⁹ Oaklander grants that the tenseless view of time cannot account for the meaningfulness of a wish that the “now” be located elsewhere than it is. But, he insists, this is not the meaning of my wish when I say, “I wish it were 1968.” So what is the meaning of my wish? Oaklander answers, “I would be wishing that I could be perceiving and not merely remembering these things I perceived ten years ago. . . . That is, I wish that I was now perceiving events that are quite other than those I am in fact now perceiving.”⁴⁰

But it seems quite obvious that Oaklander’s reconstruction of my wish is not at all what I am hoping for. For my wish has nothing to do with my perceptions—if I wanted to have different perceptions, I could go to a hypnotist! I want it to be 1968, not just to appear to be 1968. Schlesinger seems to have properly understood my wish as the desire that some other time should be present. And Oaklander admits that he cannot accommodate such a wish.

But Oaklander is not through yet. For he distinguishes the meaning of my wishes from the conditions under which my wish would be fulfilled. He says, “my wish that it was t0 would be satisfied if and only if the thought that is the wish corresponds to the fact that that thought is simultaneous with . . . the time t0.”⁴¹ The reader will by now recognize this as yet another appearance of the New Tenseless Theory of Language: It would be 1968 if and only if a token of that wish occurs in 1968. Not only do all our former objections serve to drive this poor player from the stage, but his appearance at this point makes no sense anyway. For my wish does not mean what is stated as its tenseless truth conditions, and therefore it is irrational on the static theory for me to wish for what I wish for rather than to wish for the tenseless fact expressed in its truth conditions.

Moreover, Oaklander’s recourse to the New Tenseless Theory actually serves to expose a further weakness in that theory, namely, that theory cannot in fact tell us under what conditions my wish would be true. The conditions cannot be that a token of my wish occurs in 1968, for if it were 1968 then I would not have any such wish and so there would be no token! This is even more obvious if someone were to entertain the wish, “I wish it were the Cretaceous Period.” For if it were the Cretaceous Period, there would not be anyone around to do the wishing! Thus, Oaklander is stuck with a meaningful wish, which can be rationally entertained, for which he can provide no conditions under which it would be fulfilled. By contrast the advocate of a dynamic theory of time can offer the straightforward account that my wish would be fulfilled if and only if it were now 1968, that is to say, if it were true that “1968 is present.”

Another universal human experience that presupposes the reality of temporal becoming is the experience of waiting. When we wait for something to happen, we are experiencing the lapse of time in anticipation of some event. We do not merely experience the tenseless length of the temporal interval between our location and the location of the later event. Nor is it enough simply to occupy all the temporal locations between one’s location and the location of the later event (even an inanimate object does that!) Rather there must be the experience of the passage of time. In the experience of waiting we apprehend temporal becoming, as things come to be and pass away until the anticipated event occurs. If the static view of time were correct, it would be irrational to wait for anything, since there is no temporal becoming. But such an experience is unavoidable.

About all the defender of static time could do at this point is to offer tenseless, token-reflexive truth conditions for the beliefs presupposed by the experience of waiting—a response which we have seen to be irrelevant and unavailing.

In summary, then, a phenomenological analysis of our temporal experience reveals that we experience events as happening presently, that we have peculiar attitudes toward an event depending on whether it is past or future, and that we experience temporal becoming. No doubt there are many other examples of the way in which our belief in the objective reality of tense is manifested in our experience. But these examples serve well to show how basic, deeply ingrained, strongly held, and universal is our belief in the reality of tense and temporal becoming. On a static theory of time we are all of us hopelessly mired in irrationality, prisoners to an illusion from which we are powerless to free ourselves. By contrast, if a dynamic theory of time is correct, our experiences and beliefs are entirely rational and appropriate. Thus, insofar as we think that such experiences are justified, we should embrace a dynamic theory of time.

It follows from the above argument that we are prima facie justified in holding our belief in the objective reality of the distinction between past, present, and future. Far from being controversial, such a conclusion could be accepted even by a proponent of a tenseless view of time. For we have yet to consider arguments against a dynamic theory of time, which may serve to remove the prima facie justification accorded to our tensed beliefs by experience and so defeat the current argument. Mellor, for example, despite all his objections, frankly admits, “Tense is so striking an aspect of reality that only the most compelling argument justifies denying it: namely, that the tensed view of time is self-contradictory and so cannot be true.”⁴² That is why McTaggart’s Paradox—to be considered in the next section—constitutes, in Mellor’s own words, “the lynchpin of my book.”⁴³ If McTaggart’s Paradox fails to defeat belief in the objective reality of tense, then Mellor admits that we are justified in holding our tensed beliefs.

We shall consider McTaggart’s Paradox below, but before we conclude this section it is worth pausing a moment to reflect on the strength of the argument thus far and on what it would take to defeat it. Defeaters are beliefs which are incompatible with some belief we hold and which have more warrant than our current belief. If we are to be rational in the face of an alleged defeater, we must either abandon our original belief or else defeat the defeater itself. One way to defeat an alleged defeater is to find some third belief which is compatible with our original belief but incompatible with the alleged defeater, and which has even more warrant than the alleged defeater. This third belief would be an extrinsic defeater-defeater. But there is also such a thing as an intrinsic defeater-defeater. In this case the original belief itself is seen to have more warrant than the defeaters brought against it, and so it simply overwhelms its alleged defeaters. For example, suppose you were accused of a crime which you knew you did not commit, even though all the evidence stood against you. Would you be rationally obliged in such a case to abandon belief in your innocence and go along with the evidence and believe that you are guilty? Of course not! Your belief that you did not commit the crime has far more warrant for you than the belief that you are guilty, despite the evidence supporting that accusation. Your belief intrinsically defeats its alleged defeater.

Now it deserves to be asked at this point whether our belief in the reality of tense and temporal becoming is not so powerfully warranted that it becomes an intrinsic defeater of the defeaters brought against it. On the basis of our phenomenology of temporal consciousness, it is hard to see how any belief could be more warranted for us than, say, our belief in the presentness of experience. What argument for the unreality of tense could possibly be based on premises more evident than that basic belief? McTaggart’s Paradox? Hardly! In the face of our basic belief in the reality of tense and temporal becoming, that paradox—even in the absence of a resolution—takes on the air of Zeno’s arguments for the impossibility of motion: an engaging and recalcitrant brain-teaser whose conclusion no one really takes seriously. I suspect that we shall find ourselves far more certain of the reality of tense than of the cogency of McTaggart’s argument.

We thus have two very powerful arguments, the linguistic argument and the phenomenological argument, in favor of the tensed theory of time. It now remains to be seen what arguments can be brought against that theory.

EXPOSITION

In 1908 the Cambridge idealist John Ellis McTaggart published a remarkable article in the journal Mind entitled “The Unreality of Time.”⁴⁴ McTaggart was not kidding: He firmly believed that he had come up with an argument which proves that time does not exist, and this argument was the principal legacy he bequeathed to twentieth-century philosophy. The philosopher of time Richard Gale has observed, “If one looks carefully into the multitudinous writings on time by analysts, one can detect a common underlying problem, that being that almost all of them were attempting to answer McTaggart’s paradox.”⁴⁵

What is McTaggart’s Paradox? The argument consists of two parts. In the first part McTaggart argues that time is essentially tensed. In the second part he argues that tensed time is self-contradictory. It therefore follows that time is unreal.

The first to distinguish clearly between tensed and tenseless views of time, McTaggart thus has something for everyone. Tensers love the first part of his argument, that time is essentially tensed, but they disagree with the second part, that tensed time is self-contradictory. De-tensers love the second part of his argument because it shows that the tensed view of time cannot be true, but they reject the first part because they think that time is in fact tenseless. Virtually no one agrees with McTaggart himself that time is unreal; rather the question has become the nature of time: Is it tensed or tenseless?

Since our concern is with arguments against a tensed or dynamic theory of time, we shall focus on the second half of McTaggart’s proof. His argument here is apt to appear bewildering unless we first understand its metaphysical presuppositions. The key to understanding the contradiction McTaggart sees in a dynamic view of time is his presupposition that past, present, and future events are all equally real or existent and that temporal becoming consists in the movement of the present along this series.⁴⁶ McTaggart thinks of the series of temporal events as stretched out like a string of light bulbs which are each momentarily illuminated in succession, so that the light is seen to move across the series of bulbs. In the same way presentness moves across the series of events. Since all events are equally existent, the only respect in which they change is the change in tense that they undergo. First they are future, then they are present, then they are past. In every other respect they just are. Obviously, then, for McTaggart, becoming present does not imply becoming existent.

McTaggart observes that pastness, presentness, and futurity are mutually incompatible: No event can have all three. But given McTaggart’s tenselessly existing series of temporal events, every event does have all three! Take an event tenselessly located at t₁. At t₁ that event is obviously present. But because all events are equally real, that same event also has pastness and futurity because at t₂ it is past and at t0 it is future. The moment t₁ is not any more real or privileged than t0 or t₂, and so the event in question must be characterized by the tenses it has at all these times, which is impossible. We can visualize the problem by imagining the people existing at each of these three moments. For the people at t₁, t₁ is present. Since neither t₁ nor these people pass away, it is still the case when it is t₂ that, for the people at t₁, the moment t₁ is present. But for the people at t₂, the moment t₁ is past. The moment t₁ never sheds presentness and takes on pastness—just ask the people at t₁! But t₁ never exchanges its pastness for any other tense either, as the people at t₂ will tell you. Thus, t₁ is changelessly both present and past, which is impossible. If someone should say, “But t₁ is present relative to t₁ and past relative to t₂, which is not contradictory,” the advocate of tenseless time will say that such relational properties reduce to the tenseless relations is simultaneous with and is earlier than, which vindicates the tenseless theory.

Perhaps another way of getting at the difficulty McTaggart sees is to ask when t₁ has presentness. The answer can only be: at t₁. But t₁ always haspresentness at t₁—that is tenselessly true! Therefore, t₁ never changes its tense if we say that t₁ has presentness at t₁ (and pastness at t₂, and futurity at t0, for these assertions are all tenselessly true). But if events never change their tense, then either time does not exist (McTaggart’s conclusion) or the static theory of time is correct (the de-tenser’s conclusion).

McTaggart observes that someone will respond that t₁ does not merely have presentness at t₁ but just has presentness, period. When t₁ is absolutely present, then it is not past or future as well, so that no contradiction arises. But McTaggart rejects this response because it leads to a vicious infinite regress of hyper-times, as illustrated in Fig. 4.1. In hyper-time, presentness moves along the series of moments of time. In this way one can make sense of, say, t₁’s not only being present at t₁ but also being absolutely present. For this absolute present is the present of hyper-time, in which all the moments of time are embedded.

Now the postulation of an embedding hyper-time might in itself seem so metaphysically extravagant that the reality of tense should be rejected. But McTaggart’s objection is even more fundamental: The postulation of a hyper-time solves nothing. For since hyper-time is also tensed, the same contradiction arises again on the hyper-level. The moments of hyper-time must all be equally real and therefore must each be past, present, and future, which isimpossible. The only way to escape this contradiction is to posit a third-level hyper-hyper-time in which the moments of hyper-time become successively present (Fig. 4.2).

Fig. 4.1: At successive moments of hyper-time T, successive moments of time t become present. Thus, for example, t₂ becomes present at T2.

Fig. 4.2: Hyper-time T must be embedded in a hyper-hyper-time T in which moments of T become successively present.

But obviously the same problem will recur on this third level, and so one must posit yet another level to resolve it, on to infinity. This sort of infinite regress is what philosophers call a “vicious” infinite regress, because at every level the problem remains unsolved. Thus, it simply does no good to try to elude McTaggart’s Paradox by claiming that moments of time are successively future, then present, then past.

We can formulate McTaggart’s Paradox as follows:

1. If a tensed view of time is correct, events are past, present, and future.



2. Events cannot be past, present, and future unless either

i. events are past, present, and future only in relation to other events,

or

ii. events are past, present, and future in hyper-time.

3. If a tensed view of time is correct, then events cannot be past, present, and future only in relation to other events.



4. If a tensed view of time is correct, then events cannot be past, present, and future in hyper-time.



5. Therefore, if a tensed view of time is correct, events cannot be past, present, and future.



6. Therefore, if a tensed view of time is correct, events are past, present, and future, and events cannot be past, present, and future.



7. Therefore, a tensed view of time is not correct.

CRITIQUE

Some philosophers have sought to avoid McTaggart’s Paradox by denying premise (1). They claim that it is question-begging to assert that events are (tenselessly) past, present, and future. Rather we must tense the verb and say that events are present, were future, and will be past. Then there is no contradiction. Now while I think these philosophers are on to something important, such a response is not relevant to the argument as I have formulated it. For the contradiction deduced in premise (6) is not that events are past, present, and future, but rather that they both are and are not past, present, and future. The tenseless language employed in (1) is just a harmless façon de parler. It just expresses the truth that on a tensed view of time events change with respect to their tense. The real issue is how they can do this, which is addressed in premise (2). Now McTaggart seems to me to be quite correct that the alternatives (i) and (ii) will not work for the tensed theory of time, and therefore premises (3) and (4) are true. If McTaggart has erred, then, it is by omitting some alternative from premise (2) and leaving us with a false dilemma.

It seems to me that this is exactly what has happened. McTaggart’s whole argument is based on a misguided attempt to marry a dynamic theory of temporal becoming to a static series of events. It is no wonder that the dynamic-static theory of time he winds up with proves to be self-contradictory! Sharp-sighted critics of McTaggart such as C. D. Broad and A. N. Prior have insisted almost from the beginning that a dynamic or tensed theory of time implies a commitment to presentism, the doctrine that the only temporal entities that exist are present entities.⁴⁷ According to presentism, past and future entities do not exist. Thus, there really are no past or future events, except in the sense that there have been certain events and there will be certain others; the only real events are present events. Thus, there can be no question of an event’s swapping futurity for presentness or cashing in presentness for pastness. Temporal becoming is not the exchange of tense on the part of tenselessly existing events but the coming into and going out of existence of the entities themselves. Events no more change tenses than they exchange properties of non-existence and existence! McTaggart’s Paradox thus arises, not from a dynamic theory of time, but from a misconceived union of the dynamic and static theories of time.

That presentism does avert McTaggart’s Paradox is evident from recent philosophical discussions of intrinsic change.⁴⁸ The problem posed by intrinsic change is basically this: How can something possess different properties at different times and yet be the same, identical thing? Necessarily, if “two” things are identical, then they have all the same properties (after all, they are the same thing!). But then how can something which exists at t₁ be identical with something which existed at t0 unless they have all the same properties? How is change over time possible, or, to put the question another way, how is identity over time possible?

Now McTaggart’s Paradox is actually a peculiar instance of this problem of intrinsic change. For it asks how some event E can be the same event if at t₁ it has presentness whereas at t₂ it has pastness. Or to put it another way, if E as perceived at t₁ is the same, identical event which is remembered at t₂, then how can E possess different properties or tenses at t₁ and t₂? If one says that E’s tense changed from t₁ to t₂, then it is not E that one remembers after all, but some different event. Thus, McTaggart’s argument is that intrinsic changes in the tense of events is impossible.

The presentist eludes the problem of intrinsic change by holding that the only properties a thing possesses are those it presently possesses. Thus, if a thing was red at t0 and is blue at t₁, it does not have (present tense) incompatible properties. For it only has the properties it presently has, including blueness. It did have redness once, but no longer. Thus, the thing which existed at t0 has (present tense) all the same properties which it has (present tense) at t₁. There is thus no contradiction in intrinsic change.

Similarly, an event possesses only the tense it presently has, namely, presentness. No event ever possesses pastness or futurity, for non-present events do not exist. Thus, there can be no question of any event’s possessing incompatible tense determinations. This is the germ of truth in some philosophers’ denial of premise (1). Events only have presentness; but they can be said to be past or future in the sense that it is (presently) true that they were once present or will be present. Thus, McTaggart’s Paradox is ineffectual against the presentist.

It is therefore instructive to observe that contemporary proponents of McTaggart’s Paradox, despite their varying formulations of the problem, all presuppose a hybrid dynamic-static theory of time, just as McTaggart did. For example, Mellor asserts, “Futurity, temporal presence, and pastness are all supposed to be real non-relational properties which everything in time successively possesses, changing objectively as it exchanges each of these properties for the next.”⁴⁹ Similarly, Mellor’s former student and collaboratorR. Le Poidevin insists that even those who deny that the future is real imply by that very denial that the past, at least, is real: “although the dinosaurs (for example) are extinct, they are still real to the extent that it is they and their properties which make statements about dinosaurs true. . . . To make sense of the past’s being real and the future not, we have to talk of being real simpliciter, not once being real, or being about to be real.”⁵⁰ Oaklander could not be clearer in his misconstruing the tensed theory of time as a union of the dynamic and static theories:

On the traditional tensed . . . theory of time, the NOW is a particular or property that moves along an ordered, but as yet non-temporal, . . . series. The terms of the . . . series exist (tenselessly) in unchanging relations to each other, and these unchanging relations become temporal relations as the NOW moves across them. . . .⁵¹

What our discussion reveals, then, is that McTaggart’s Paradox is not really an argument against a dynamic theory of time at all. Rather it is aimed (and effectively so, I think) at a teratological hybrid, the dynamic-static theory of time.

Thus, if we adopt presentism in line with a pure dynamic theory of time, we avoid McTaggart’s Paradox. Significantly, Le Poidevin, at least, admits this: Presentism “represents the only means to block McTaggart’s proof of the unreality of time consistently with the assumption of a non-relational past, present, and future.”⁵² Presentism enables us to revise premise (2) so as to admit a third alternative:

2’. Events cannot be past, present, and future unless either

i. events are past, present, and future only in relation to other events,

or

ii. events are past, present, and future in hyper-time,

or

iii. only present events exist, and events are past or future only in the sense that they were or will be present.

The proponent of McTaggart’s Paradox, if his argument is to be successful, must now refute the presentist alternative (iii). So what is wrong with presentism?

Presentism is frequently rejected because it is thought to imply, in conjunction with the Special Theory of Relativity, a sort of solipsism (the view that I alone exist), which no sane person can believe.⁵³ This unwelcome consequence is due to the absence of absolute time and space within the context of STR, which makes it impossible to define any plausible co-existence relation between oneself and other things.⁵⁴ Although we shall have more to say about this subject later,⁵⁵ anyone who has followed our argument in chapter 2 will realize that this objection to presentism is easy to answer. The objection is predicated upon an Einsteinian interpretation of STR which the defender of divine temporality should reject on wholly independent grounds in favor of a Lorentzian interpretation. A Lorentzian understanding of relativity, it will be recalled,⁵⁶ preserves relations of absolute simultaneity and so confronts no challenge concerning co-existence relations among temporal beings. The presentist who accepts Lorentzian relativity is thus not threatened by the specter of solipsism.

Le Poidevin also charges that presentism implies “temporal solipsism,” but by that epithet he signifies a number of technical philosophical doctrines which he finds objectionable.⁵⁷ While I agree with Le Poidevin that these doctrines are implausible, his case that they are implied by presentism is not very convincing. For example, he claims that if presentism is true, then we cannot make true existence statements about the past, such as “Some Frenchmen fell at Waterloo.” This is because the logical form of such a statement is understood to be there is some individual x such that x was a Frenchman and xfell at Waterloo. Notice that according to the logical form of this statement there is some individual x. Le Poidevin takes this to show that logic commits us to the reality of all individuals, whether they are past, present, or future.

This argument, however, strikes me as quite contrived. The language of logic is an artificial, tenseless language which simply ignores tense distinctions in ordinary language. The presentist agrees that, in the tenseless universe of discourse of classical logic, we can truly say that there are (tenselessly) past and future individuals, that is to say, logic ranges over all individuals in the actual world, abstracting from whether they are past, present, or future. There is just no metaphysical significance in this artificial tenseless discourse. Now if we do want to invest logical form with metaphysical significance, then the presentist can propose either of two reforms: (i) we can take existence claims to be, not tenseless, but multiply tensed; for example, there was, is, or will be some individual x such that x was a Frenchman and x fell at Waterloo; or else (ii) we may supplement classical logic with so-called tense logic by prefixing existence statements with tense indicators; for example, it was the case that there is some individual x . . . or it will be the case that there is some individual x . . . By means of either of these alternatives the presentist can make it clear that existence statements about past and future individuals do not imply that those individuals are as real as present individuals. But these complications are doubtlessly unnecessary, since there is just no reason to regard the artificial language of classical logic as fraught with metaphysical significance.

Again, Le Poidevin objects that if presentism is true, then there can be no relations between things which do not exist at the same time, since at least one of them does not exist. But obviously such relations do exist; for example, the Battle of Hastings was earlier than the Battle of Waterloo, Kennedy was envied by Nixon, Aquinas was smarter than Attila, and so forth. There are a couple of problems with this objection. First, it just assumes that trans-temporal relations cannot exist. If there are such things as relations, then why do both members of a relation have to exist at the same time? Second, the objection proves too much. If it were correct, then there could be no relations between individuals in different logically possible worlds. There could be no relation of trans-world identity, for example. Thus, we could not say that in some possible world I weigh one pound more than I actually do, which implies the absurd conclusion that I have all my properties essentially. Any philosophical reconstruction of such trans-world relations aimed at replacing them with more acceptable notions can be paralleled by a similar reconstruction of trans-temporal relations. They stand or fall together. Finally, third, in many cases we probably could dispense with trans-temporal relations. For example, we could simply say that Nixon had the property of envying Kennedy. No further relation is required. (Indeed, we can imagine cases where someone might be envious of, say, a wholly fictitious person, in which case there is no relation to an individual at all.) Or again, we could say that Attila had a certain IQ and Aquinas had a certain IQ, and the one number is higher than the other. Even relations of earlier/later than can be plausibly analyzed in non-relational terms, as we shall see.⁵⁸ Thus, Le Poidevin’s second objection is not compelling.

Le Poidevin presents further difficulties, but these seem no more persuasive than the above, so the reader may be left to pursue the more technical discussion of these issues should he desire to.⁵⁹

So far we have not seen compelling reasons to reject the presentist perspective. Indeed, considerations arising from a discussion of McTaggart’s Paradox suggest a positive reason to accept presentism. For there is a sort of modal McTaggart’s Paradox, which is parallel to the temporal McTaggart’s Paradox, the solution to which is analogous to presentism.⁶⁰ It goes like this: Something cannot be both actual and merely possible. But everything that exists is both of these: It is actual in the actual world and merely possible in some other possible world in which it does not exist. Someone will say that it is not inconsistent to be actual relative to the actual world and merely possible relative to some other world. But this leads to an infinite regress. For since the actual world is actual relative to itself and some merely possible world is actual relative to itself, we must postulate some hyper-actual world in which only one of these two worlds is actual. But then the same problem arises for the hyper-actual world, and so on to infinity.

The usual answer to this modal problem is to adopt the doctrine of actualism, the view that only the actual world is real. Possible worlds are merely abstract ways the world might conceivably have been. Thus, there really are no concrete, parallel worlds which have actuality as does the actual world. Now actualism is precisely parallel to presentism. As Le Poidevin admits, “The doctrine that only the actual world is real avoids the modal paradox just as the doctrine that only the present is real avoids McTaggart’s paradox.”⁶¹ Since these two problems and their solutions are parallel, consistency demands that they must be accepted or rejected together. Either accept both actualism and presentism or else hold that just as all moments of time are equally real, so all possible worlds are equally real. The same sort of objections that Le Poidevin lodges against “temporal solipsism” can be analogously lodged against “modal solipsism”; and the same sort of moves that the actualist can make to escape these can also be made by the presentist. Thus, thinkers such as Le Poidevin who want to embrace actualism and yet reject presentism find themselves in real tension.

It only needs to be added that the tiny handful of philosophers who consistently believe in the concrete reality of all possible worlds and all moments of time find themselves burdened with a metaphysical worldview which the vast majority of philosophers find quite outlandish.⁶²

Thus, the key to avoiding McTaggart’s Paradox is presentism. McTaggart’s central mistake, as the distinguished British philosopher Michael Dummett has pointed out, is that he assumed that there must exist a single, complete description of reality.⁶³ But if we take tense seriously, no such description can exist. There is rather a different description of reality that holds at each and every moment that is present. McTaggart wants to describe the world, as the medieval theologians put it, sub specie aeternitatis (from the standpoint of eternity), and yet include tense in that description. You cannot do both. A timeless view of reality excludes tense, which is why the reality of tense and temporal becoming implies that God, as One who is really related to and knows the world, is temporal. One can hardly, then, object to the reality of tense, as McTaggart does, on the grounds that a tensed world cannot be captured in a single, timeless description.

EXPOSITION

The idea that time flows or passes is a common idea in Western philosophy, at least as old as the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Isaac Newton, it will be recalled, held that absolute time “flows equably without relation to anything external.”⁶⁴ McTaggart took such language literally. He states, “The movement of time consists in the fact that later and later terms pass into the present, or—which is the same fact expressed another way—that presentness passes to later and later terms.”⁶⁵

The passage of time is an undisputed feature of psychological time. During bursts of activity time seems to pass quickly, and we are apt to exclaim, “How time flies!” By contrast, when we are languishing, time passes excruciatingly slowly, and we complain, “Time keeps dragging by.” The question is whether this feature of psychological time is also a feature of time itself.

A number of proponents of the static view of time have charged that the idea of a literal passage of time is nonsense and that therefore a dynamic theory of time cannot be correct.⁶⁶ For since the dynamic view of time is committed to the objective reality of temporal becoming, it implies the reality of the passage of time. Since time’s passage is purely psychological, the dynamic theory does not give us the truth about time.

The passage of time must be a myth, it is argued, because otherwise unanswerable questions arise. For example, how fast does time flow? In cases of literal motion, we measure the distance traversed per unit of time; for example, sixty miles per hour. But in the case of time’s passage, we are measuring the amount of time crossed per—what? What sense is there in talking about how fast a minute passes? A minute passes in a minute—a mere tautology! Thus, no non-trivial content can be given to the claim that time passes. Second, an event occurring at a single instant would have a sort of history if time passes: First it would be future, then it would be present, then it would be past. But since it only exists at an instant, it cannot have a history in ordinary time. Therefore, the passage of time must occur relative to a hyper-time. In so many units of hyper-time, presentness moves across so many units of ordinary time. But then we have to ask about the flow of hyper-time, and off we go on a vicious infinite regress. A literal flow of time is therefore incoherent.

We can formulate the objection to time’s passage as follows:

1. If time is dynamic, time’s passage is a mind-independent reality.



2. Time’s passage cannot be a mind-independent reality.



3. Therefore, time is not dynamic.

CRITIQUE

It is a curiosity of the philosophical discussion of this issue that the truth of premise (2), so loudly trumpeted by certain static time theorists, is accepted by the wide majority of defenders of dynamic time. Nor does this represent a concession on their part to the proponents of static time. Rather the objections to a literal flow of time were borrowed by critics such as D. C. Williams and J. J. C. Smart from C. D. Broad’s critique of McTaggart. Broad, a philosophical convert to a pure tensed theory of time, saw clearly the problems inherent in McTaggart’s hybrid dynamic-static theory.⁶⁷ Temporal becoming, Broad insisted, should not be thought of as the literal motion of presentness along a series of tenselessly existing events. Otherwise one lands in precisely the conundrums explained above. Temporal becoming, on Broad’s view, is not a qualitative change in an event. Becoming real is not like, say, becoming fat, for in temporal becoming there is no enduring subject which moves from the future into the present or from non-existence to existence. Rather temporal becoming is absolute becoming—not becoming this or that, but simply coming to be. An event is simply something’s coming into existence.

Broad’s presentism thus led him to deny premise (1), that a dynamic view of time implies a literal passage of time. It is ironic (and perhaps indicative of the sloppiness of their argumentation) that static time theorists misappropriated Broad’s objections to time’s passage in order to argue against the dynamic theory itself. Most dynamic theorists would agree with A. N. Prior when he said that the flow or passage of time “is just a metaphor”—albeit an important one.⁶⁸ According to Prior the flow of time is metaphorical because what it refers to is neither a genuine motion nor a genuine change; but the force of the metaphor can be explained by the objectivity of tensed facts. That is the reality behind the metaphor.

More recently, Smart has acknowledged that dynamic time theorists take the passage of time to be a metaphor for objective temporal becoming.⁶⁹ But he questions whether objective temporal becoming makes any more sense than the idea of time’s passage. Normally, we speak of something’s becoming this or that; but temporal becoming is conceived to be absolute. “In the pure becoming of an event,” demands Smart, “what does the event become?”⁷⁰

Smart’s question is strangely misconceived, however, for he himself has repeatedly emphasized Broad’s point that it is things, not events, that come to be; an event is just the coming to be of some thing or things.⁷¹ If a thing can be said to become anything, it becomes actual or real. But this is not the acquisition of a new property in place of a (pseudo-) property of non-actuality or unreality. It just is the existing of the thing with all its properties. Smart does proceed to acknowledge that it makes sense to say that in temporal becoming an event becomes present. But he finds this explanation unhelpful, since every event becomes present at some time or other. Smart has here lapsed back into thinking of all events in the temporal series as equally real and so as equally present at their respective times. But on the presentist view, presentness is had absolutely, not just relative to a time, and thus the only events that truly have presentness are the events currently happening. Smart’s objections may have purchase against a McTaggartian, hybrid view of time, but they are irrelevant to a pure dynamic theory of temporal becoming.

A much more serious difficulty confronts the defender of objective temporal becoming, however, a conundrum about time that is at least as old as Aristotle.⁷² This is the problem of the extent of the present. If only thepresent exists and the past and future are unreal, then reality seems to be reduced to a literal instant. An instant has by definition zero duration. But if things exist for literally zero amount of time, how is this different from not existing at all? The claim that only present things exist thus seems self-destructive. This problem so impressed Broad that late in life he himself actually embraced the existence of a hyper-time in which events that are instantaneous in ordinary time endure.⁷³

Could the present be a mere instant? A great many philosophers see no problem in this idea. The present would be like an instantaneous slice of space-time. An instant would be what is called a degenerate interval, that is to say, an interval of zero duration. An instantaneous slice of space-time would be, for example, everything existing at precisely the instant we mark at 3:00 p.m. EST. Such an instantaneous state of physical reality would be described by all the statements true at that instant.

While an instantaneous state seems to make sense, however, it is not clear how such a conception of reality is to be united with temporal becoming. Put as simply as possible, the problem is that since instants have no immediate successors (between any two instants there is always an infinity of intermediate instants), it is difficult to see how time can elapse instant by instant, one at a time, consecutively. Moreover, how could any non-zero interval of time ever elapse, since the addition of durationless instants can never add up to a non-zero interval? These difficulties, which deeply disturbed a great mind like Alfred North Whitehead, are resolved by the eminent philosopher of space and time Adolf Grünbaum only at the expense of denying the reality of temporal becoming and embracing a static theory of time.⁷⁴

Whitehead preferred to deny that temporal becoming is a continuous process involving instants, advocating instead the existence of minimum, discrete “atoms” of time, often called “chronons.” On an atomistic view, although time is infinitely divisible in thought, there are in reality indivisible, finite intervals of time which compose time. Chronons may or may not be conceived to have precise boundary points; rather than thinking of them like marbles in a line, we should perhaps think of them as blurry, shading into one another. On the atomist view, only the present chronon exists, being wholly present, and temporal becoming proceeds one chronon at a time.

One disturbing feature of such an understanding of temporal becoming is that becoming is “jerky” rather than smooth. Reality unfolds like the successive frames of a movie film projected on a screen—the frames pass too quickly for the discontinuities to be noticed, but there are “leaps” between them nonetheless. Not that there is anything that happens in between chronons which we miss out on, for there is no in-between. On such a view, change is discontinuous.

This can lead to some bizarre results. Consider, for example, the Stadium Paradox of the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno. He invites us to imagine two rows of spatial atoms moving in opposite directions along a row of atoms at rest at the rate of one atom per chronon (Fig. 4.3).

Fig 4.3: Zeno’s Stadium Paradox

At chronon 1, A1 and B1 are aligned, then at chronon 2, A3 and B1 are aligned. But this seems crazy because it implies that there never was any event of the alignment of A2 with B1. But in order to move from being aligned with A1 to being aligned with A3, B1 must have passed A2 at some time. If we say that such an alignment did occur, it must have occurred in between chronons, which is impossible. Therefore, we have no choice but to say that reality jumped discontinuously from one state to another. If we can find some way of avoiding this sort of weirdness, it would surely be preferable to do so!

Let us therefore explore a different understanding of the extent of the present. We might maintain that “the present” is not a metrical concept and therefore does not refer to any specific measured interval. This alternative seems to have been implied by the French philosopher Henri Bergson.⁷⁵ In Bergson’s view real duration is not composed of instants or time atoms but is prior in reality to our mathematization of it. All metrical concepts of time are secondary constructions. British philosopher Rom Harre thus contends that the question about the extent of the present

only makes sense if we have already accepted a certain mathematical model for the formal representation of temporal discourse, and then have taken that model to be descriptive in all its aspects of some basic temporal reality.

       The model is a continuous, linear point manifold on to which the expressions that occur in temporal talk are to be mapped. . . . For example, the expressions “past,” “present,” and “future” are translated into mathematical features of the manifold.⁷⁶

Reject that model, as Bergson does, and the question “How many points of the manifold does the ‘now’ enclose?” is no longer a question about reality.

On this view, to ask, “What is the extent of the present?” is a malformed question. In order for the question to be meaningful, one must stipulate what it is we are talking about: the present vibration of an atomic clock, the present session of Congress, the present war, or what have you? There is no such metric interval as “the present,” period; we must speak of “the present _____,” where the blank is filled by a reference to some event or thing. If we choose to speak of time itself, then our question becomes trivial: “How long is the present minute?” “One minute!”

If an atomist were to demand what the minimum temporal duration is, we could coherently reply that there is no minimum duration. Time should not be thought of as composed of an infinite number of instants; but any interval of time may be conceptually infinitely divisible. That is to say, the dividing can go on to infinity as a limit at which one never arrives. Thus, any interval taken to be present, say, the present minute, can be subdivided into phases, which will be past, present, and future respectively. The present will be any arbitrarily chosen interval centered on a present instant. Because time is not composed of instants, temporal becoming does not proceed by instants; rather duration is conceptually prior to any sort of divisions we make in it.

Such a view is admittedly strange because it implies that there is no such thing as the present time. Rather what is present depends on the universe of discourse: Are we talking about seconds, or minutes, or hours, or what? And even these intervals can be analyzed into sub-intervals, not all of which are present. We instinctively feel that there must be some unique metric interval which is present absolutely, and God is sustaining it in being. But such a feeling may be the result of our mathematization of time, thinking of time on the model of a geometrical line composed of points. But it is precisely this model that such a view rejects.

None of the alternatives for understanding the extent of the present leaves one feeling entirely comfortable. But discomfort is not incoherence. It may be a reflection of how profoundly difficult time is to understand. It does not show that temporal becoming is unreal.

In fact, at this point the defender of temporal becoming may attempt to turn the tables on the static time theorist by arguing that only the dynamic view, committed as it is to the reality of temporal becoming, enables us to understand the asymmetry of time. The asymmetry of time consists in two distinct, but frequently confused, features of time: (i) the anisotropy of time and (ii) the direction of time. Isotropy is the property of being the same in all directions. For example, space is isotropic. There is no “up” or “down” in outer space; it is entirely arbitrary, for example, that globes and world maps of the earth always situate the North Pole on the top and the South Pole on the bottom. (A politically correct mindset might see this as indicative of the arrogance of the peoples of the northern hemisphere, always wanting to be on top and lording it over the peoples of the southern hemisphere!) But in contrast to space, time is not isotropic. It has two distinguishable directions: “earlier” and “later.” There is an objective difference between being earlier than some event and being later than that event. It is virtually universally agreed that time is essentially ordered by the relations earlier than and later than; any dimension not possessing the directions “earlier” and “later” is not a temporal dimension. On the other hand, the direction of time has to do with time’s being oriented in one direction. By contrast, the temperature scale on a thermometer is anisotropic (there is a difference between “colder” and “hotter”), but it has no inherent direction. The temperature can move in either direction. Time, on the other hand, does seem to have a direction: from past to future. If an arbitrarily chosen event occurs, and we were asked which event would occur next, we would unhesitatingly point to the event after it, not to the event before it. It is the directionality of time that gives rise to the sense of the irretrievability of the past, which comes to expression in such proverbs as, “It’s no use crying over spilled milk,” or, “That’s water under the bridge.”

Now clearly if time has a direction, then time must be anisotropic. The dynamic time theorist finds in the objective reality of temporal becoming a basis for affirming time’s directionality and therefore also its anisotropy. The asymmetry of time is thus objectively grounded in temporal becoming. The static theory, on the other hand, does not seem to have any basis for affirming the asymmetry of time, so that its proponents have simply to assume time’s asymmetry or to deny it.

The dynamic time theorist grounds the direction of time in the impossibility of a backward lapse of time. The absurdity of a backward lapse of time can be seen by contemplating the idea of backward continuing.⁷⁷ Temporal continuing or endurance is not simply the tenseless, temporal extension of some object. On a dynamic theory of time, the successive moments of an object’s duration do not all tenselessly exist; rather they come into being and pass away. If an object exists at the present moment, then in order for it to continue to exist, another moment must come into being. But such an additional moment can only come to be after the present moment. It seems completely unintelligible to say that that additional moment might come to be before the present moment. If the moment existed before the present moment, then we would say that this was a case of the object’s enduring from the past moment to the present moment. On a presentist view it simply makes no sense to say that an object continued to exist from the present moment until the past moment. Even if we imagine events occurring in reverse order, as when a film is run backwards, still the reversed-sequence events occur one after the other. What is impossible to conceive is that the moments of time themselves should occur in reverse order. Thus, on a dynamic theory time must be invested with a direction.

On a dynamic theory of time, then, the anisotropy of time and the directionality of time become perspicuous, being grounded in the nature of temporal becoming.

By contrast, the static theory of time seems to lack the resources for making time’s asymmetry anything more than a groundless assumption. A great deal of ink has been spilled in the attempt to ground time’s asymmetry in various physical processes such as entropy increase, the expansion of the universe, and so forth. From a theistic perspective, however, all such attempts seem misconceived. For one can easily conceive of a possible world in which God creates a universe lacking any of the typical thermodynamic, cosmological, or other arrows of time, and yet He experiences the successive states of the universe in accord with the lapse of His absolute time. There seems to be no good reason to think of the physical processes as anything more than empirical measures or indicators of the lapse of time, rather than as constitutive of the nature of time itself.

Furthermore, even considered on their own merit, such physical processes are simply irrelevant to a definition of temporal asymmetry. For why should we regard one direction of the physical process as the “earlier” direction rather than the “later” direction? If this decision is not to be utterly arbitrary, there must be some non-physical feature of time which serves to differentiate the “earlier” from the “later” direction. Sklar observes that we do not mean by “earlier than” something such as “having lower entropy than”; rather the association of lower entropy states with earlier times of a physical process is an empirical discovery we make about the world, a discovery which we may then use to ascertain in other cases which stages of a physical process are earlier.⁷⁸ According to Sklar, “we know independently of our knowledge of the lawlike behavior of physical processes in time, what the actual time order of events really is. Only this ‘independent’ knowledge of temporal order would allow us to decide which of the lawlike descriptions is, in fact, the true lawlike description of the world.”⁷⁹ He makes the important observation that in the inner life of the mind I directly experience the temporal succession of experiences, and I find that the same later than relation also seems to characterize events in the external world. If I also discover that external events are similarly related by some physical relation, such a discovery would at best show a correlation but not an identity of the physical and temporal relations. In this sense, Sklar concludes, there really is no need for a “theory of the direction of time”—“we may suppose that at least some relations of temporal priority are also among the directly inspectable features of events.”⁸⁰

So if relations of temporal asymmetry exist and are knowable independently of physical processes, what is the foundation, on the static theory, of the asymmetry of time? The static time theorist seems obliged to treat time’s asymmetry as just a “given.” But this assumption fits ill with a static theory of time, for given the tenseless existence of all events, time seems to be isotropic and directionless. Indeed, some static time theorists such as Paul Horwich and Huw Price have therefore boldly affirmed that time is wholly symmetric.⁸¹ Such a position is consistent with the static theory, but it seems fantastic in light of our experience of earlier and later. In order to have a credible theory of time, the static time theorist must simply assume the existence of temporal anisotropy. But that assumption seems ad hoc and fails to mesh naturally with his tenseless understanding of time. Thus, ironically, the so-called myth of passage, once properly analyzed, far from undermining the dynamic theory, actually redounds to its credit and serves to highlight one of its advantages over the theory of tenseless time: It furnishes a foundation for the existence of temporal asymmetry.

In conclusion of this section, we may say that neither McTaggart’s Paradox nor the Myth of Passage provides good grounds for rejecting a dynamic theory of time, since these objections are in truth aimed at a hybrid, dynamic-static theory of time. So directed, they are cogent objections. But the pure dynamic time theorist, or presentist, is not at all menaced by these foes. Rather the serious difficulty he must confront is the classic problem of the extent of the present. None of the options here is without its drawbacks. The question is whether this difficulty is so great as to outbalance the arguments in favor of a dynamic theory of time.

In this chapter we have seen two powerful arguments in favor of a tensed or dynamic theory of time: the argument from the ineliminability of tense and the argument from our experience of tense. It seems to me that arguments based on the irreducibility of tensed facts and on the undeniable presentness of experience are sufficiently strong to outweigh any puzzles attending the extent of the present. The remaining question, then, is whether a consideration of arguments for and against a static theory of time will reinforce or subvert this conclusion.

Recommended Reading

THE INELIMINABILITY OF TENSE

Gale, Richard. The Language of Time. International Library of Philosophy and Scientific Method. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968.

Perry, John. “The Problem of the Essential Indexical.” Noûs 13 (1979): 3-29.

Mellor, D. H. Real Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Smith, Quentin. Language and Time. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Oaklander, L. Nathan, and Quentin Smith, eds. The New Theory of Time, part I. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994.

Craig, William Lane. “Tense and the New B-Theory of Language.” Philosophy 71 (1996): 5-26.

Recanati, François. “Direct Reference, Meaning, and Thought.” Noûs 24 (1990): 1-18.

Craig, William Lane. “The New B-Theory’s Tu Quoque Argument.” Synthese 107 (1996): 249-269.

OUR EXPERIENCE OF TENSE

Prior, A. N. “Thank Goodness That’s Over.” Philosophy 34 (1959): 12-17.

Mellor, D. H. Real Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

________. “MacBeath’s Soluble Aspirin.” Ratio 25 (1983): 89-92.

Schlesinger, George. Aspects of Time. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980.

Hestevold, H. Scott. “Passage and the Presence of Experience.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (1990): 537-552.

Oaklander, L. Nathan, and Quentin Smith, eds. The New Theory of Time, part III. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994.

Craig, William Lane. “The Presentness of Experience.” In Time, Creation, and World Order. Edited by Mogens Wegener. Acta Jutlandica LXXIV: 1. Humanities Series 72. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1999.

________. “Tensed Time and Our Differential Experience of the Past and Future.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 37 (1999): 515-537.

________. “On Wishing It Were Now Some Other Time.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (2001): 1-8.

MCTAGGART’S PARADOX

McTaggart, J. M. E. The Nature of Existence, 2 vols. Edited by C. D. Broad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927; rep. ed.: 1968.

Wisdom, John. “Time, Fact and Substance.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 29 (1928–1929): 69-94.

Broad, C. D. An Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938; rep. ed.: New York, Octagon Books, 1976.

Lowe, E. J. “The Indexical Fallacy in McTaggart’s Proof of the Unreality of Time.” Mind 96 (1987): 62-70.

Mellor, D. H. Real Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Buller, David J., and Thomas R. Foster. “The New Paradox of Temporal Transience.” Philosophical Quarterly 42 (1992): 357-366.

Le Poidevin, Robin. Change, Cause and Contradiction: A Defense of the Tenseless Theory of Time. London: Macmillan, 1991.

Prior, A. N. “The Notion of the Present.” Studium Generale 23 (1970): 245-248.

Wolterstorff, Nicholas. “Can Ontology Do without Events?” Grazer Philosophische Studien 7/8 (1979): 177-201.

Craig, William Lane. “McTaggart’s Paradox and the Problem of Temporary Intrinsics.” Analysis 58 (1998): 122-127.

________. “McTaggart’s Paradox and Temporal Solipsism.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 79 (2001): 32-44.

Dummett, Michael. “A Defense of McTaggart’s Proof of the Unreality of Time.” Philosophical Review 69 (1960): 497-504.

________. “The Reality of the Past.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 69 (1968–1969): 239-258.

Cresswell, M. J. “Modality and Mellor’s McTaggart.” Studia Logica 49 (1990): 163-170.

THE MYTH OF PASSAGE

Broad, C. D. An Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938; rep. ed.: New York: Octagon Books, 1976.

Williams, Donald C. “The Myth of Passage.” Journal of Philosophy 48 (1951): 457-472.

Craig, William Lane. “The Extent of the Present.” International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 14 (2000): 165-185.

Prior, A. N. “Changes in Events and Changes in Things.” In Papers on Time and Tense, pp. 1-14. Oxford: Clarendon, 1968.

Grünbaum, Adolf. “Relativity and the Atomicity of Becoming.” Review of Metaphysics 4 (1950–1951): 143-186.

R. M. Blake. “The Paradox of Temporal Process.” Journal of Philosophy 23 (1926): 645-654.

Whitrow, G. J. The Natural Philosophy of Time, 2d ed., chapter 4. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Loizou, Andros. The Reality of Time. Brookfield, Vt.: Gower, 1986.

Waterlow, Sarah. “Backwards Causation and Continuing.” Mind 83 (1974): 372-387.

Craig, William Lane. “Temporal Becoming and the Direction of Time.” Philosophy and Theology 11 (1999): 349-366.

Sklar, Lawrence. Space, Time, and Space-Time, pp. 352-411. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

Horwich, Paul. Asymmetries in Time, pp. 37-71. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987.

Price, Huw. Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

¹ Michael Tooley, Time, Tense, and Causation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 13.

² According to Gorman and Wessman, “all four thousand or so known languages enable their speakers to designate temporal relationships and to distinguish between past, present, and future events—though with varying degrees of difficulty” (Bernard S. Gorman and Alden E. Wessman, “The Emergence of Human Awareness and Concepts of Time,” in The Personal Experience of Time, ed. Bernard S. Gorman and Alden E. Wessman [New York: Plenum Press, 1977], 44-45).

³ See especially Richard M. Gale, The Language of Time, International Library of Philosophy and Scientific Method (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968); and Quentin Smith, Language and Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

⁴ In the present context a “token” is a particular example of a type of thing. A sentence token is thus a particular utterance or inscription of a sentence. For example, when two people say, “Mrs. Brown is not at home,” there are two tokens of the sentence. There is one sentence type, and in that sense they utter the same sentence; but there are two tokens of that sentence type, one spoken by the first individual and the other by the second. A sentence is token-reflexive if a token of that sentence refers to itself, e.g., “This sentence has five words.”

⁵ John Perry, “The Problem of the Essential Indexical,” Noûs 13 (1979): 3-29; idem, “Frege on Demonstratives,” Philosophical Review 86 (1977): 474-477.

⁶ Perry, “Essential Indexical,” 4.

⁷ D. H. Mellor, Real Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

⁸ Ibid., 6, 50.

⁹ We shall come back to the presentness of experience in the next section.

¹⁰ The symbol “≡” means “if and only if.” This signifies the logical equivalence of the statements connected by the symbol; that is to say, the statements mutually imply each other.

¹¹ This is called the Tarski schema for truth after the logician Alfred Tarski. It means that a statement is true if and only if what that statement says is the case. Thus, it is true that “Snow is white” if and only if snow is white.

¹² Jeremy Butterfield, “Indexicals and Tense,” in Exercises in Analysis, ed. Ian Hacking (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 69-87.

¹³ Alvin Plantinga, “Reply to Robert Adams,” in Alvin Plantinga, ed. James Tomberlin and Peter van Inwagen, Profiles 5 (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), 378.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ D. H. Mellor, Real Time II (London: Routledge, 1998), xi, 32.

¹⁶ Ibid., 25.

¹⁷ Ibid., 34.

¹⁸ A view of truth as correspondence does not imply the existence of truth makers, and only a minority of philosophers explicitly endorse the idea that there are such entities as truth makers. Moreover, even among truth-maker theorists some hold that true past- and future-tense sentences do not have truth makers—rather the present-tense counterparts of such sentences did or will have truth makers.

¹⁹ Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1940), 108-110.

²⁰ Compare Kvanvig’s account discussed in chapter 3, pages 100-101.

²¹ See David Lewis, “Attitudes de dicto and de se,” Philosophical Review 88 (1979): 513-543; Roderick Chisholm, The First Person (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981); idem, “Why Singular Propositions?” in Themes from Kaplan, ed. Joseph Almog, John Perry, and Howard Wettstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 145-150.

²² Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, ed. Martin Heidegger, trans. James Churchill, with an introduction by Calvin O. Schrag (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1964), 86.

²³ William Friedman, About Time (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 92.

²⁴ Ibid., 2.

²⁵ J. J. C. Smart, “Spacetime and Individuals,” in Logic and Art, ed. Richard Rudner and Israel Scheffler (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), 19-20.

²⁶ For an account of this notion see Alvin Plantinga, “Reason and Belief in God,” in Faith and Rationality, ed. Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 47-63.

²⁷ Huw Price, Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 15.

²⁸ Mellor, Real Time, 26.

²⁹ If Mellor’s argument were successful, it would also imply that we do not even observe events to be earlier or later than one another. For a common problem in astronomy is that a galaxy farther away than another can appear to be the same distance from us because the more distant one is bigger and therefore of the same brightness. Someone unaware of this difference in distance would think that the galactic events he observes in both are simultaneous, when in fact events in the more distant galaxy occurred earlier than the events observed in the other.

³⁰ Mellor, Real Time, 26.

³¹ Ibid., 53.

³² Ibid., 54; see also his revised account in D. H. Mellor, “MacBeath’s Soluble Aspirin,” Ratio 25 (1983): 92.

³³ A. N. Prior, “Thank Goodness That’s Over,” Philosophy 34 (1959): 17.

³⁴ Mellor, “MacBeath’s Aspirin,” 91; see also Murray MacBeath, “Mellor’s Emeritus Headache,” Ratio 25 (1983): 86-87.

³⁵ George Schlesinger, Aspects of Time (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 35.

³⁶ L. Nathan Oaklander, Temporal Relations and Temporal Becoming (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984), 146.

³⁷ Lawrence Sklar, Space, Time, and Space-Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), section F of chapter 5.

³⁸ Schlesinger, Aspects of Time, 39.

³⁹ Oaklander, Temporal Relations, 159.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 160.

⁴¹ Ibid., 161.

⁴² Mellor, Real Time, 4-5.

⁴³ Ibid., 3.

⁴⁴ J. Ellis McTaggart, “The Unreality of Time,” Mind 17 (1908): 457-474. The argument is defended against objections in McTaggart’s The Nature of Existence, 2 vols., ed. C. D. Broad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927; rep. ed.: 1968), chapter 33.

⁴⁵ Gale, Language of Time, 6.

⁴⁶ See, for example, his statements in McTaggart, “Unreality of Time,” 463; idem, Nature of Existence, 2:11.

⁴⁷ C. D. Broad, An Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938; rep. ed.: New York: Octagon Books, 1976), 2:280-302; A. N. Prior, “The Notion of the Present,” Studium Generale 23 (1970): 245-248.

⁴⁸ See David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 203-204; Trenton Merricks, “Endurance and Indiscernibility,” Journal of Philosophy 91 (1994): 165-184.

⁴⁹ Mellor, Real Time, 4.

⁵⁰ Robin Le Poidevin, “Lowe on McTaggart,” Mind 102 (1993): 168.

⁵¹ L. Nathan Oaklander, “Zeilicovici on Temporal Becoming,” Philosophia 21 (1991): 329.

⁵² Robin Le Poidevin, Change, Cause, and Contradiction: A Defense of the Tenseless Theory of Time (London: Macmillan, 1991), 36.

⁵³ See, for example, D. H. Mellor, “Special Relativity and Present Truth,” Analysis 34 (1973–1974): 75-76.

⁵⁴ Yuri Balashov, “Enduring and Perduring Objects in Minkowski Space-Time,” Philosophical Studies 99 (2000): 129-166.

⁵⁵ See chapter 5, pages 169-170.

⁵⁶ See chapter 3, pages 54-57.

⁵⁷ Le Poidevin, Change, Cause, and Contradiction, chapter 3.

⁵⁸ See chapter 5, pages 190-192.

⁵⁹ See my “McTaggart’s Paradox and Temporal Solipsism,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 79 (2001): 32-44.

⁶⁰ See M. J. Cresswell, “Modality and Mellor’s McTaggart,” Studia Logica 49 (1990): 163-170.

⁶¹ Le Poidevin, Change, Cause, and Contradiction, 35.

⁶² For a critique, see Peter van Inwagen, “Indexicality and Actuality,” Philosophical Review 89 (1980): 415-417.

⁶³ Michael Dummett, “A Defense of McTaggart’s Proof of the Unreality of Time,” Philosophical Review 69 (1960): 503; idem, “The Reality of the Past,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 69 (1968–1969): 252-253.

⁶⁴ Isaac Newton, Sir Isaac Newton’s “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy” and his “System of the World,” trans. Andrew Motte, rev. with an appendix by Florian Cajori, 2 vols. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 1:6.

⁶⁵ McTaggart, Nature of Existence, 2:10.

⁶⁶ Donald C. Williams, “The Myth of Passage,” Journal of Philosophy 48 (1951): 457-472; J. J. C. Smart, “The River of Time,” Mind 58 (1949): 483-494; idem, “The Temporal Asymmetry of the World,” Analysis 14 (1953–1954): 79-83.

⁶⁷ Broad, Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy, 2:277-280.

⁶⁸ Arthur N. Prior, “Changes in Events and Changes in Things,” in Papers on Time and Tense (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 1.

⁶⁹ J. J. C. Smart, “Time and Becoming,” in Time and Cause, ed. Peter van Inwagen, Philosophical Studies Series in Philosophy (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980), 4.

⁷⁰ Ibid., 5.

⁷¹ See Smart, “River of Time,” 486; idem, “Temporal Asymmetry,” 81; Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967), s.v. “Time,” by J. J. C. Smart.

⁷² See Aristotle, Physics 4. 10. 217b33-218a9. For a wonderful discussion of the early history of this conundrum see Richard Sorabji, Time, Creation, and the Continuum (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), 7-63. Augustine in particular agonized over this problem in his Confessions 9.15-28.

⁷³ C. D. Broad, “A Reply to My Critics,” in The Philosophy of C. D. Broad, ed. P. A. Schilpp, Library of Living Philosophers (New York: Tudor, 1959), 769-772.

⁷⁴ See Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, corr. ed., ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 68; idem Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925), 125-127; Adolf Grünbaum, “Relativity and the Atomicity of Becoming,” Review of Metaphysics 4 (1950–1951): 143-186; idem, “A Consistent Conception of the Extended Linear Continuum as an Aggregate of Unextended Elements,” Philosophy of Science 19 (1952): 288-306.

⁷⁵ Henri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, trans. Leon Jacobson, with an introduction by Herbert Dingle, Library of Liberal Arts (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), chapter 3.See also Andros Loizou, The Reality of Time (Brookfield, Vt.: Gower, 1986), 44-45.

⁷⁶ Rom Harre, “There Is No Time Like the Present,” in Logic and Reality, ed. B. J. Copeland (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 406.

⁷⁷ See Sarah Waterlow, “Backwards Causation and Continuing,” Mind 83 (1974): 372-387.

⁷⁸ Sklar, Space, Time, and Space-Time, 403-404.

⁷⁹ Ibid., 402.

⁸⁰ Ibid., 410-411.

⁸¹ Paul Horwich, Asymmetries in Time (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 54-57; Price, Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point.

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