Instead of accepting instants of time as metaphysically basic entities, many philosophers regard them as abstractions from something else. There is the Russell-Whitehead view that times are maximal classes of simultaneous events; the linguistic ersatzer's proposal that times are maximally consistent sets of sentences or propositions; and the view that times are made up of temporal parts of material objects. This paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of these various proposals and concludes in favor of a particular version of linguistic (...) ersatzism about time. (shrink)

This article characterizes the varieties of four-dimensionalism and provides a critical overview of the main arguments in support of it.

My main objective, in this paper, is to present at least a rough sketch of a new model for understanding time. Since many people are quite content with the model that they have, it will be worth while to show why a new model might be desirable, or even necessary. As it happens, looking at the problems involved in the more usual conception of time leads one naturally to look in certain directions for solutions, and such an introduction can therefore (...) explain why the new model looks the way it does. With all this in mind, then, this paper will be broken down into three parts. In the first part, I’ll try to show that no-one has ever experienced time as such. In the second part, I shall argue that one good reason for this is that there is no such thing as time proper. Finally, in the third part, I’ll try to reassemble what’s left of the conception of time after all this demolition, and I’ll offer a positive model (albeit rather vague) of what I prefer to call "temporality". (shrink)

This is an overview of my book, Four-Dimensionalism. The spatiotemporal metaphysics of Russell, Smart, Quine and Lewis is a blend of separable components concerning time, persistence, mereology, and even semantics, unified by the theme that space and time are analogous: eternalism (past and future objects are just as real as current objects); the reducibility of tense (tensed utterances have tenseless truth conditions; 'now' is an indexical); four-dimensionalism: temporal parts exist; unrestricted composition (all objects, however scattered, have a mereological sum, or (...) fusion), and the "worm view" (continuants, i.e., the objects we normally refer to and quantifier over, are space-time worms, that is, aggregates of temporal as well as spatial parts). My book defends each component except the last. (shrink)