Abstract

One of the most puzzling things about time is that peculiar experience we all have of the present forever “moving” from the past towards the future. What is now future becomes progressively closer to the present as time goes on, until it becomes present, and finally slips away into the past. Philosophers of time seem to divide themselves into two main camps concerning the ontological status of these phenomena. The objectivist insists that this temporal “becoming” is an objective feature of the real world, that this progression of now is an aspect of reality quite independent of our experience. The subjectivist argues to the contrary that temporal becoming is a subjective phenomenon which has no existence apart from the experience of some sentient being. Richard Gale in Chapters X and XI of The Language of Time takes the objectivist position. He argues for the objectivity of temporal becoming by claiming that the conceptual systems embodied in ordinary language rule out the subjective position.