Abstract

The main aim of this work is to present a unified treatment of three philosophical problems about time which have come to be regarded as distinct and unrelated. These are: the question of whether time is to be conceived as self-existent or as a relational structure among events; the question of what constitutes the direction of time; and the question of whether temporal becoming may be considered an objective feature of the natural world. ;I contend here that the third of these questions should be answered in the affirmative. This automatically provides us with an answer to the second question, for the direction of time may be construed as the order in which events come to be: that is, in terms of the relation of possible succession. This in turn requires the provision of a foundation for the theory of time in terms of an intrinsic relational structure among possible events. ;In chapter I, I give a preview of these conclusions and lay out my strategy for establishing them in the succeeding chapters. ;In chapter II, I trace the historical development of the modern physical concept of time, and give a detailed discussion of both Leibniz's and Newton's treatments of it. I use this discussion to introduce a number of issues about time: in particular, the opposition between "actualist" and "possibilist" conceptions, the association of time with spacetime and the concept of inertia, and the connection of time homogeneity and the concept of energy. Newton's classical treatment of temporal transiency by means of his fluxional system is also examined in detail, and both his and Leibniz's theories of time are construed as attempts to reassert the continuity of temporal becoming and motion in the face of Descartes' assertions of the atomicity of temporal becoming and the relativity of motion. ;In chapter III, I argue that the absolute-relational controversy may be resolved by taking the essential structure of time to be that of a local chronological ordering intrinsic to possible events. . . . UMI