Online research in philosophy

What is a temporal part? Most accounts explain it in terms of timeless parthood: a thing's having a part without temporal qualification. Some find this hard to understand, and thus find the view that persisting things have temporal parts—four-dimensionalism—unintelligible. T. Sider offers to help by defining temporal parthood in terms of a thing's having a part at a time. I argue that no such account can capture the notion of a temporal part that figures in orthodox four-dimensionalism: temporal parts must be timeless parts. This enables us to state four-dimensionalism more clearly.

Those who believe that ordinary things have temporal as well as spatial parts must give an account of the truth conditions of temporally modified predications of the form ‘a is F at t ’ in terms of temporal parts. I will argue that the friend of temporal parts is committed to an account of temporal predication that is incompatible with the classical principle of predicate abstraction.

Provocatively, David Armstrong's properties are supposed to be both universals and spatio-temporal. What does this amount to? I consider four of Armstrong's views, in order of ascending plausibility: (1) the exemplification account, on which universals are exemplified by space-times; (2) the location account, on which universals are located at space-times; (3) the first constituent account, on which spatio-temporal relations are elements of what I call the form of time; and, the true view, (4) the second constituent account, on which universals are spatio-temporal only 'derivatively' by being constituents of states of affairs which are so 'primarily'. The first two accounts are rejected because they entail that space-times must be substantival. In making plausible the second constituent account, I distinguish primitive and derivative spatio-temporality. Something is primitively spatio-temporal when it is at a space-time, or stands in spatio-temporal relations. Something is derivatively spatio-temporal when it is a constituent of something primitively spatio-temporal.

What is a temporal part? Most accounts explain it in terms of timeless parthood: a thing's having a part without temporal qualification. Some find this hard to understand, and thus find the view that persisting things have temporal parts--fourdimensionalism--unintelligible. T. Sider offers to help by defining temporal parthood in terms of a thing's having a part at a time. I argue that no such account can capture the notion of a temporal part that figures in orthodox four-dimensionalism: temporal parts must be timeless parts. This enables us to state four-dimensionalism more clearly.

We experience time in different ways, and we construct different kinds of representation of time. What kinds of representation are there and how do they work? In particular, how do we integrate temporal features of the world into our understanding of the mechanisms underlying representations in the media of perception, memory, art, and narrative? Le Poidevin’s well written and carefully argued book is an exploration of these questions. Although interesting in its own right, Le Poidevin pursues this question as a means of exploring another pressing issue, namely the metaphysics of time. The central posit of the book is that we can learn a lot about time from ordinary representations of time, and accordingly the book is an exploration of what representations of time can tell us about the metaphysical structure of time itself. This viewpoint is justified by the adoption of a causal theory of representation, the claim that representations are causally linked to what they represent and that this is what determines both their content and their epistemic status. The central metaphysical concern of the book is the reality of the passage of time. Does time in reality pass, and can events therefore be located in the past, present, or future, or does time not pass and nothing in reality changes its position in time? In McTaggart’s terms, this is the distinction between the A-theory and the B- theory of time.

In this paper I argue that a recently discovered set of visual illusions sheds new light on the nature of time consciousness. In particular, I argue that these illusions put strong pressure on a view I call Temporal Atomism that otherwise might have seemed quite attractive. According to temporal atomism if you were to fix which non-temporal properties are experienced as well as the temporal properties of your experience itself, you would also have fixed which temporal properties are experienced. While it has been claimed before that views like temporal atomism are confused, and face conceptual as well as empirical problems, my argument based on the newly discovered illusions provides a new and more straightforward challenge: temporal atomism either has to give up its crucial motivations, or it can not even so much as make sense of the content of the subject’s visual experience. I end with brief suggestions concerning how the results of this paper bears on further philosophical debates about time consciousness, change blindness, and the role of attention in perceptual experience.

According to McCall and Lowe (2003) interpreting the twins’ paradox reconciles the A-theorist’s notion of temporal passage or flow with the special theory of relativity. Miller, however, recalls that “the B-theorist never denied that there was temporal passage in some sense of the term” (Miller 2004, 204), and argues convincingly that McCall and Lowe stipulate nothing other than this B-theorist’s sense of temporal succession. But, as I want to show, we need in fact the A-theorist’s or even presentist’s account of temporal passage in the sense of a ‘moving now’ in order to preserve the temporal content of the twins’ paradox. It is essential, I think, that for a temporal understanding of the twins’ paradox proper times and coordinate times have to be combined in a way that only the presentists can cope.

In response to a recent challenge that the New B-theory of Time argues invalidly from the claim that tensed sentences have tenseless truth conditions to the conclusion that temporal reality is tenseless, I argue that while early B-theorists may have relied on some such inference, New B-theorists do not. Giving tenseless truth conditions for tensed sentences is not intended to prove that temporal reality is tenseless. Rather, it is intended to undermine the A-theorist’s move from claims about the irreducibility of tensed language to the conclusion that temporal reality must be tensed. I then examine how A-theorists have used facts about language in attempting to establish their conclusions about the nature of temporal reality. I take the recent work of William Lane Craig and argue that he implicitly and illicitly moves from facts about temporal language to his conclusion that temporal reality is tensed.

The theorist who denies the objective reality of non-relational temporal properties, or ‘A-series’ determinations, must explain our experience of the passage of time. D.H. Mellor, a prominent denier of the objective reality of temporal passage, draws, in part, on Kant in offering a theory according to which the experience of temporal passage is the result of the projection of change in belief. But Mellor has missed some important points Kant has to make about time-awareness. It turns out that Kant's theory of time-awareness also involves projection – but for him, the projection of temporal passage is necessary to any coherent experience at all, and for this reason events in the world cannot be represented except as exhibiting real tensed change. Consequently we cannot intelligibly suppose the world we know to be without the passage of time. This fact would permit a modest transcendental argument the conclusion of which is that we are entitled to describe the world in terms of temporal passage.

Abstract: A theory of time is a theory of the nature of temporal reality, and temporal reality determines the truth-value of temporal sentences. Therefore it is reasonable to ask how a theory of time can account for the way the truth of temporal sentences is determined. This poses certain challenges for both the A theory and the B theory of time. In this paper, I outline an account of temporal sentences. The key feature of the account is that the primary bearers of truth-values are not utterances, but sentences evaluated with respect to a time. I argue that unlike other views, the present proposal can meet the challenges faced both by the A and the B theory.