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Growing Block Views
Edited by Sam Baron (University of Melbourne)
About this topic
| Summary | The growing block view of time can be seen as the combination of two theses. First of all, the growing block view is committed to a dynamic account of time, on which there is an objective, changing present. The growing block conception of time shares this commitment with a number of other A-theoretic accounts of time, including presentism and the moving spotlight theory. The second commitment is ontological; past and present times exist, while future times do not exist. On the growing block view, there is a block of objectively past time-slices and one present time-slice. As the present changes, new present slices are added to the block. The combination of these dynamic and ontological commitments means that the growing block view of time is often portrayed as a middle ground between presentism and eternalism and as a hybrid of A- and B-theory. |
| Key works | For an early defense of the growing block view of time see Broad 1923. Also see Thomas 2019, who looks at defenses of growing block views prior to Broad. Tooley 1997 is a contemporary book length defense of the position. More recent advocates of the growing block view of time include Forrest 2004, Briggs & Forbes 2017, and Button 2006. Miller 2018 offers a good comparison of a specific version of the growing block view and presentism. The growing block view of time faces a serious skeptical challenge in accounting for our knowledge that we are present. Versions of this objection are raised by Bourne 2002 and Braddon-Mitchell 2004. |
| Introductions | Good introductions include Markosian 2010, Miller 2013, and Perović 2019. |
Show all references
Related
Siblings
- Eternalism (276)
- Presentism (453)
- The Open Future (316)
- Determinism (858)
- Fatalism (342)
- Temporal Eliminativism (74)
- Temporal Ontology, Misc (135)
Contents
118 found
Order:
| 1 — 50 / 118 |
- In Defense of Temporal Passage.Steven M. Duncan - manuscriptIn this paper, I endorse and defend the Common Sense View of Time (CSVT), i.e. Presentism plus the A-theory of time, by arguing for the objective reality of temporal passage.
- Causal Set Theory and Growing Block? Not Quite.Marco Forgione - manuscriptIn this contribution, I explore the possibility of characterizing the emergence of time in causal set theory (CST) in terms of the growing block universe (GBU) metaphysics. I show that although GBU seems to be the most intuitive time metaphysics for CST, it leaves us with a number of interpretation problems, independently of which dynamics we choose to favor for the theory —here I shall consider the Classical Sequential Growth and the Covariant model. Discrete general covariance of the CSG dynamics (...)
- Back to a New and Improved Future.Taylor W. Cyr & Grace Scott - forthcoming - In Joshua Heter & Richard Greene (eds.), Back to the Future and Philosophy: This is Heavy!
- Time, Metaphysics of.Natalja Deng - forthcoming - Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.Metaphysics is the part of philosophy that asks questions about the nature of reality – about what there is, and what it is like. The metaphysics of time is the part of the philosophy of time that asks questions about the nature of temporal reality. One central such question is that of whether time passes or flows, or whether it has a dynamic aspect.
- Our Naïve Representation of Time and of the Open Future.Batoul Hodroj, Andrew J. Latham & Kristie Miller - forthcoming - Dialectica.It’s generally thought that we naively or pre-theoretically represent the future to be open. While philosophers have modelled future openness in different ways, it’s unclear which, if any, captures our naïve sense that the future is open. In this paper we focus on just one way the future might count as being open: by being nomically open, and empirically investigate whether our naïve representation of the future as open is partly constituted by representing the future as nomically open. We also (...)
- Time and Modality.Samuele Iaquinto - forthcoming - In Nina Emery (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Time. Routledge.Time and modality show remarkable similarities. Each of the most discussed theories in philosophy of time finds an analogous counterpart in modal metaphysics, suggesting that the parallel between the two notions is metaphysically deep. This chapter offers a brief overview of their analogies. Section 1 addresses the analogy between presentism and actualism. Section 2 explores the analogy between non-presentist theories and possibilism. Section 3 discusses the analogy between temporal and modal persistence.
- C. D. Broad on Precognitions and John William Dunne.Matyas Moravec - forthcoming - Journal of the History of Philosophy.C. D. Broad developed three different accounts of time over the course of his career. Emily Thomas has recently argued that the shift from the first to the second of these was motivated by his engagement with the philosophy of Samuel Alexander. In this paper, I argue that the shift from the second to the third was instigated by Broad’s engagement with precognitive dreams and with the thought of John William Dunne. Furthermore, I argue that fully appreciating Broad’s interest in (...)Remove from this listExport citation
Bookmark - Dead Past, Ad hocness, and Zombies.Ernesto Graziani - 2024 - Acta Analytica (3):1-14.The Dead Past Growing Block theory of time—DPGB-theory—is the metaphysical view that the past and the present tenselessly exist, whereas the future does not, and that only the present hosts mentality, whereas the past lacks it and is, in this sense, dead. One main reason in favour of this view is that it is immune to the now-now objection or epistemic objection (which aims at undermining the certainty, within an A-theoretical universe, of being currently experiencing the objective present time). In (...)
- The Future of the Present.Ulrich Meyer - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89:463-478.Some theories of time entail that the present can change before or after it has happened. Examples include views on which time-travelers can change the past, the glowing block theory, Peter Geach’s mutable future view, and the moving spotlight theory. This paper argues that such ante factum or posthumous change requires a heterodox “split time” view on which earlier-than is not the converse of later-than.
- The Sooner the Better: An Argument for Bias Toward the Earlier.Bradford Saad - 2024 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 10 (2):371-386.In this article I argue that we should be prudentially and morally biased toward earlier events: other things equal, we should prefer for good events to occur earlier and disprefer for bad events to occur earlier. The argument contends that we should accord at least some credence—if only a small one—to a theoretical package featuring the growing block theory of time and that this package generates a presumptive bias toward earlier events. Rival theoretical packages are considered. Under reasonable allocations of (...)
- Moving ego versus moving time: investigating the shared source of future-bias and near-bias.Sam Baron, Brigitte C. Everett, Andrew J. Latham, Kristie Miller, Hannah Tierney & Jordan Veng Thang Oh - 2023 - Synthese 202 (3):1-33.It has been hypothesized that our believing that, or its seeming to us as though, the world is in some way dynamical partially explains (and perhaps rationalizes) future-bias. Recent work has, in turn, found a correlation between future-bias and near-bias, suggesting that there is a common explanation for both. Call the claim that what partially explains our being both future- and near-biased is our believing/it seeming to us as though the world is dynamical, the dynamical explanation. We empirically test two (...)
- Trouble on the Horizon for Presentism.Sam Baron & Baptiste Le Bihan - 2023 - Philosophers' Imprint 23 (1):2.Surface presentism is the combination of a general relativistic physics with a presentist metaphysics. In this paper, we provide an argument against this combination based on black holes. The problem focuses on the notion of an event horizon. We argue that the present locations of event horizons are ontologically dependent on future black hole regions, and that this dependence is incompatible with presentism. We consider five responses to the problem available to the surface presentist, and argue that none succeed. Surface (...)
- Le futur ouvert.Vincent Grandjean - 2023 - Paris: Éditions Hermann.Ce livre propose une étude détaillée et une défense systématique d’une intuition-clé que nous partageons tous à propos de la nature du temps : celle que le futur est ouvert, tandis que le passé est fixé. Si l’occurrence d’une Troisième Guerre mondiale semble indéterminée, il y a bel et bien eu une Première Guerre mondiale. -/- Dans le présent ouvrage, l’auteur fournit une élucidation cohérente, non métaphorique et métaphysiquement éclairante de l’intuition ; il détermine quel modèle de structure temporelle du (...)
- Why do people represent time as dynamical? An investigation of temporal dynamism and the open future.Andrew J. Latham & Kristie Miller - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (5):1717-1742.Deflationists hold that it does not seem to us, in experience, as though time robustly passes. There is some recent empirical evidence that appears to support this contention. Equally, empirical evidence suggests that we naïvely represent time as dynamical. Thus deflationists are faced with an explanatory burden. If, as they maintain, the world seems to us in experience as though it is non-dynamical, then why do we represent time as dynamical? This paper takes up the challenge of investigating, on the (...)
- The Passage of Time as Causal Succession of Events.Avril Styrman - 2023 - Journal of Philosophy 120 (12):681-697.This work introduces a causal explanation of the passage of time, and contrasts it with rival explanations. In the causal explanation, laws of physics are shown to entail that events are in causal succession, and the passage of time is defined as their causal succession. The causal explanation is coupled with phenomenology of the passage of time, and contrasted with the project of making sense of the idea that time does not pass.
- Paradoxes of Time Travel to the Future.Sara Bernstein - 2022 - In Helen Beebee & A. R. J. Fisher (eds.), Perspectives on the Philosophy of David K. Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.This paper brings two fresh perspectives on Lewis’s theory of time travel. First: many key aspects and theoretical desiderata of Lewis’s theory can be captured in a framework that does not commit to eternalism about time. Second: implementing aspects of Lewisian time travel in a non-eternalist framework provides theoretical resources for a better treatment of time travel to the future. While time travel to the past has been extensively analyzed, time travel to the future has been comparatively underexplored. I make (...)$80.83 used (collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct downloadExport citation Bookmark 1 citation
- Look at the time!David Builes - 2022 - Analysis 82 (1):15-23.I argue that we can get evidence for the temporal ontology of the universe simply by looking at the time. The argument is an extension of the ‘epistemic objection’ towards Growing Block theories.
- The Asymmetric Nature of Time.Vincent Grandjean - 2022 - Springer Nature.This open access monograph offers a detailed study and a systematic defense of a key intuition we typically have, as human beings, with respect to the nature of time: the intuition that the future is open, whereas the past is fixed. For example, whereas it seems unsettled whether there will be a fourth world war, it is settled that there was a first world war. -/- The book contributes, in particular, three major and original insights. First, it provides a coherent, (...)
- Alethic Openness and the Growing Block Theory of Time.Batoul Hodroj, Andrew J. Latham, Jordan Lee-Tory & Kristie Miller - 2022 - The Philosophical Quarterly 73 (2):532-556.Whatever its ultimate philosophical merits, it is often thought that the growing block theory presents an intuitive picture of reality that accords well with our pre-reflective or folk view of time, and of the past, present, and future. This is partly motivated by the idea that we find it intuitive that, in some sense, the future is open and the past closed, and that the growing block theory is particularly well suited to accommodate this being so. In this paper, we (...)
- The Growing Block and What was Once Present.Peter Tan - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (6):2779-2800.According to the growing block ontology of time, there (tenselessly and unrestrictedly) exist past and present objects and events, but no future objects or events. The growing block is made attractive not just because of the attractiveness of its ontological basis for past-tensed truths, the past’s fixity, and future’s openness, but by underlying principles about the right way to fill in this sort of ontology. I shall argue that given these underlying views about the connection between truth and ontology, growing (...)
- Replies to Critics.Fabrice Correia & Sven Rosenkranz - 2021 - Disputatio 13 (63):445-494.In what follows, we will reply to the critical comments one by one in the order that seemed most natural to us, given the topics covered. Apart from the references section towards the end, our replies are conceived as pieces each of which can be read independently from any of the others (but not, of course, independently from the comments it responds to). We hope to have done justice to the critical points made by our commentators and to have come (...)
- Plenty to Come: Making Sense of Correia & Rosenkranz’s Growing Block.Natalja Deng - 2021 - Disputatio 13 (63):363-372.Fabrice Correia and Sven Rosenkranz’s book Nothing to Come: a Defence of the Growing Block Theory of Time offers an incredibly rich and skillful defense of the growing block theory (GBT), a view of time that arguably has much intuitive appeal, and which has been under attack from many sides. Nonetheless, I have to report that the book’s tense-logical course of treatment has not worked for me; I still struggle with making sense of the GBT. This article begins by drawing (...)
- On metaphysics’ independence from truthmaking. Or, Why Humean Supervenience is Compatible with the Growing Block Universe.Aldo Filomeno - 2021 - Erkenntnis 88 (4):1467-1480.This paper aims to support the claim that analytic metaphysics should be more cautious regarding the constraints that truthmaking considerations impose on metaphysical theories. To this end, I reply to Briggs and Forbes (2017), whoargue that certain truthmaking commitments are incurred by a Humean metaphysics and by the Growing-Block theory. First, I argue that Humean Supervenience does not need to endorse a standard version of truthmaker maximalism. This undermines Briggs and Forbes’s conclusion that Humean Supervenience and the Growing-Block theory are (...)
- Symmetric and asymmetric theories of time.Vincent Grandjean - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):14403-14426.There is a feeling of dissatisfaction with the traditional way of defining the A-theories of time. One reason is that these definitions rest on an ontological question—‘Do the future and the past exist?’—to which no non-speculative answer can be provided. Another reason is that these definitions fail to distinguish between various A-theories of time at all times and, therefore, cannot be regarded as essential to them. In the present paper, I make a fresh start in the debate, by introducing two (...)
- Open future, supervaluationism and the growing-block theory: a stage-theoretical account.Roberto Loss - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):14249-14266.I present a ‘stage-theoretical’ interpretation of the supervaluationist semantics for the growing-block theory of time according to which the ‘nodes’ on the branching tree of historical possibilities are taken to be possible stages of the growth of the growing-block. As I will argue, the resulting interpretation (i) is very intuitive, (ii) can easily ward off an objection to supervaluationist treatments of the growing-block theory presented by Fabrice Correia and Sven Rosenkranz, and (iii) is also not saddled by the problems affecting (...)
- The Growing Block, the Epistemic Objection and Zombie Parrots.Ned Markosian - 2021 - Disputatio 13 (63):399-410.This piece is a contribution to a book symposium on Fabrice Correia and Sven Rosenkranz's _Nothing to Come: A Defense of the Growing Block Theory of Time_. I start by considering one of the main objections that has been raised against the Growing Block Theory, namely, the Epistemic Objection, together with Correia and Rosenkranz's response to that objection. This leads to a question about whether Correia and Rosenkranz’s view is a Four-Dimensionalist version of the Growing Block Theory or a Three-Dimensionalist (...)
- Times, Locations and the Epistemic Objection.Kristie Miller - 2021 - Disputatio 13 (63):385-398.Very roughly, the epistemic objection to the growing block theory (GBT) says that according to that theory there are many past times at which persons falsely believe they are present. Since there is nothing subjectively distinguishable about a situation in which one truly believes one is present, from a situation in which one falsely believes one is present, the GBT is a theory on which we cannot know that we are present. In their articulation and defence of the GBT, Correia (...)
- The Growing Block, the Open Future and Future Truths.Stephan Torre - 2021 - Disputatio 13 (63):423-432.In Nothing to Come, Fabrice Correia and Sven Rosenkranz provide a sophisticated, compelling, and thoroughly defended account of the growing block theory. This note critically evaluates two aspects of this account. First, it evaluates Correia and Rosenkranz’s attempt at providing a grounding principle for future truths and argues that this principle fails to make progress in explaining why future truths are true. Second, it evaluates Correia and Rosenkranz’s construal of the open future arguing that the asymmetry in openness with respect (...)
- Getting Younger.Daniel Vázquez - 2021 - Rhizomata 9 (1):84-95.I argue that in Plato’s Parmenides 141a6–c4, things in time come to be simultaneously older and younger than themselves because a thing’s past and present selves are both real. As a result, whatever temporal relation is predicated of any of these past and present selves is true of the thing in question. Unlike other interpretations, this reading neither assumes that things in time have to replace their parts, nor that time is circular. I conclude that the passage is committed to (...)
- Temporal existence and temporal location.Fabrice Correia & Sven Rosenkranz - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (7):1999-2011.We argue that sensitivity to the distinction between the tensed notion of being something and the tensed notion of being located at the present time serves as a good antidote to confusions in debates about time and existence, in particular in the debate about how to characterise presentism, and saves us the trouble of going through unnecessary epicycles. Both notions are frequently expressed using the tensed verb ‘to exist’, making it systematically ambiguous. It is a commendable strategy to avoid using (...)
- Une asymétrie temporelle: passé fermé et futur ouvert.Vincent Grandjean - 2020 - Philosophie de la Connaissance.Nous partageons, au sujet de la nature du temps, l’intuition fondamentale selon laquelle le futur est ouvert tandis que le passé est fermé. Par exemple, alors que nous pensons pouvoir influencer le cours du futur, nous savons qu’aucune de nos actions ne peut influencer le cours du passé. Cependant, bien que cette intuition soit largement partagée, identifier la nature de l’asymétrie qu’elle reflète n’est pas chose aisée. Dans cet article, j’explore différentes manières de caractériser l’asymétrie entre le ‘futur ouvert’ et (...)
- Being pessimistic about the objective present.Derek Lam - 2020 - Synthese (12):1-16.Some philosophers argue that non-presentist A-theories problematically imply that we cannot know that this moment is present. The problem is usually presented as arising from the combination of the A-theoretic ideology of a privileged presentness and a non-presentist ontology. The goal of this essay is to show that the epistemic problem can be rephrased as a pessimistic induction. By doing so, I will show that the epistemic problem, in fact, stems from the A-theoretic ideology alone. Hence, once it is properly (...)
- Future Ontology: Indeterminate Existence or Non-existence?Michael Tze-Sung Longenecker - 2020 - Philosophia 48 (4):1493-1500.The Growing Block Theory of time says that the metaphysical openness of the future should be understood in terms of there not being any future objects or events. But in a series of works, Ross Cameron, Elizabeth Barnes, and Robbie Williams have developed a competing view that understands metaphysical openness in terms of it being indeterminate whether there exist future objects or events. I argue that the three reasons they give for preferring their account are not compelling. And since the (...)
- Temporal Synechism: A Peircean Philosophy of Time.Jon Alan Schmidt - 2020 - Axiomathes 32 (2):233-269.Charles Sanders Peirce is best known as the founder of pragmatism, but the name that he preferred for his overall system of thought was ‘‘synechism’’ because the principle of continuity was its central thesis. He considered time to be the paradigmatic example and often wrote about its various aspects while discussing other topics. This essay draws from many of those widely scattered texts to formulate a distinctively Peircean philosophy of time, incorporating extensive quotations into a comprehensive and coherent synthesis. Time (...)
- The Common Present in a Block Universe.Yuri Balashov - 2019 - Seminário Lógica No Avião.Our present experiences are strikingly different from past and future ones. Every philosophy of time must explain this difference. It has long been argued that A-theorists can do it better than B-theorists because their explanation is most natural and straightforward: present experiences appear to be special because they are special. I do not wish to dispute one aspect of this advantage. But I contend that the general perception of this debate is seriously incomplete as it tends to conflate two rather (...)
- The future, and what might have been.R. A. Briggs & Graeme A. Forbes - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (2):505-532.We show that five important elements of the ‘nomological package’— laws, counterfactuals, chances, dispositions, and counterfactuals—needn’t be a problem for the Growing-Block view. We begin with the framework given in Briggs and Forbes (in The real truth about the unreal future. Oxford studies in metaphysics. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012 ), and, taking laws as primitive, we show that the Growing-Block view has the resources to provide an account of possibility, and a natural semantics for non-backtracking causal counterfactuals. We show (...)
- (1 other version)How is the asymmetry between the open future and the fixed past to be characterized?Vincent Grandjean - 2019 - Synthese (3):1-24.A basic intuition we have regarding the nature of time is that the future is open whereas the past is fixed. For example, whereas we think that there are things we can do to affect how the future will unfold, we think that there are not things we can do to affect how the past unfolded. However, although this intuition is largely shared, it is not a straightforward matter to determine the nature of the asymmetry it reflects. So, in this (...)
- No ground for doomsday.Roberto Loss - 2019 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (9-10):1136-1156.ABSTRACTThe ability of providing an adequate supervenience base for tensed truths may seem to be one of the main theoretical advantages of both the growing-block and the moving-spotlight theory of time over presentism. However, in this paper I will argue that some propositions appear to be as problematic for growing-block theorists as past-directed propositions are for presentists, namely propositions stating that nothing will be the case in the future. Furthermore, I will show that the moving-spotlight theory can adequately address all (...)
- The cresting wave: a new moving spotlight theory.Kristie Miller - 2019 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (1):94-122.One argument for the moving spotlight theory is that it better explains certain aspects of our temporal phenomenology than does any static theory of time. Call this the argument from passage phenomenology. In this paper it is argued that insofar as moving spotlight theorists take this to be a sound argument they ought embrace a new version of the moving spotlight theory according to which the moving spotlight is a cresting wave of causal efficacy. On this view it is more (...)
- Why ‘NOW’?Peter J. Riggs - 2019 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 50 (1):171-180.A recently published hypothesis on the nature of time by physicist Richard A. Muller seeks to provide an objective account of the present moment and the ‘flow’ of time. Muller also claims that his hypothesis makes testable predictions. It is shown that the predictions offered cannot be used to test Muller’s hypothesis, that the hypothesis does not rate scientific status, has a number of questionable metaphysical premises, and is merely a re-fashioning of the Growing Block theory of time.
- The Growing Block Theory and the Epistemic Objection.Peihong Xie - 2019 - Dissertation, Wuhan UniversityAs a main challenge to the growing block theory (GBT), the epistemic objection is intended to show that GBT is untenable because it leads to the ignorance of the objective present. What is worse, extant solutions to this objection, the dead past view (DPV) and strong tense views (STV), are unsatisfactory on the ground that their semantic explanations of tensed statements undermine the purported semantic unity of GBT and thus make GBT collapse into a version of presentism. In contrast to (...)
- Nothing to Come: A Defence of the Growing Block Theory of Time.Fabrice Correia & Sven Rosenkranz - 2018 - Cham, Switzerland: Springer Verlag. Edited by Sven Rosenkranz.This monograph is a detailed study, and systematic defence, of the Growing Block Theory of time (GBT), first conceived by C.D. Broad. The book offers a coherent, logically perspicuous and ideologically lean formulation of GBT, defends it against the most notorious objections to be found in the extant philosophical literature, and shows how it can be derived from a more general theory, consistent with relativistic spacetime, on the pre-relativistic assumption of an absolute and total temporal order. -/- The authors devise (...)
- What is temporal ontology?Natalja Deng - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (3):793-807.Temporal ontology is the part of ontology involving the rival positions of presentism, eternalism, and the growing block theory. While this much is clear, it’s surprisingly difficult to elucidate the substance of the disagreement between presentists and eternalists. Certain events happened that are not happening now; what is it to disagree about whether these events exist? In spite of widespread suspicion concerning the status and methods of analytic metaphysics, skeptics’ doubts about this debate have not generally been heeded, neither by (...)
- L’éternité sans le temps.Baptiste Le Bihan - 2018 - Revue Philosophique De Louvain 116 (3):441-462.L'éternalisme implique une forme exotique d'éternité : toute entité, aussi éphémère soit-elle et quelle que soit sa localisation dans le temps, existe relativement à toute autre localisation temporelle. Cet essai vise, premièrement, à défendre l'éternalisme en exhibant les difficultés rédhibitoires du présentisme et du non-futurisme, et deuxièmement à examiner de quelle manière l'éternalisme pourrait être amendé à l'aune d'une affirmation que l'on trouve sous la plume de certains physiciens, à savoir que, fondamentalement, le temps n'existe pas. La disparition du temps (...)
- Imprints in time: towards a moderately robust past.Michael Tze-Sung Longenecker - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (10):2429-2446.Presentism says that only present objects exist. But the view has trouble grounding past-tensed truths like “dinosaurs existed”. Standard Eternalism grounds those truths by positing the existence of past objects—like dinosaurs. But Standard Eternalism conflicts with the intuition that there is genuine change—the intuition that there once were dinosaurs and no longer are any. I offer a novel theory of time—‘The Imprint’—that does a better job preserving both the grounding and genuine change intuitions. The Imprint says that the past and (...)
- The new growing block theory vs presentism.Kristie Miller - 2018 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 61 (3):223-251.It was once held to be a virtue of the growing block theory that it combines temporal dynamism with a straightforward account of in virtue of what past-tensed propositions are true, and an explanation for why some future-tensed propositions are not true (assuming they are not). This put the growing block theory ahead of its principal dynamist rival: presentism. Recently, new growing block theorists have suggested that what makes true, past-tensed propositions, is not the same kind of thing as what (...)
- Time Travel and the Movable Present.Sara Bernstein - 2017 - In John Christopher Adorno (ed.), Being, Freedom, and Method: Themes from the Philosophy of Peter van Inwagen. pp. 80-94.In "Changing the Past" (2010), Peter van Inwagen argues that a time traveler can change the past without paradox in a growing block universe. After erasing the portion of past existence that generates paradox, a new, non-paradox-generating block can be "grown" after the temporal relocation of the time traveler. -/- I articulate and explore the underlying mechanism of Van Inwagen's model: the time traveler's control over the location of the objective present. Van Inwagen's model is aimed at preventing paradox by (...)
- The Growing-Block: just one thing after another?R. A. Briggs & Graeme A. Forbes - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (4):927-943.In this article, we consider two independently appealing theories—the Growing-Block view and Humean Supervenience—and argue that at least one is false. The Growing-Block view is a theory about the nature of time. It says that past and present things exist, while future things do not, and the passage of time consists in new things coming into existence. Humean Supervenience is a theory about the nature of entities like laws, nomological possibility, counterfactuals, dispositions, causation, and chance. It says that none of (...)
- Making Sense of the Growing Block View.Natalja Deng - 2017 - Philosophia 45 (3):1113-1127.In this paper, I try to make sense of the growing block view using Kit Fine’s three-fold classification of A-theoretic views of time. I begin by motivating the endeavor of making sense of the growing block view by examining John Earman’s project in ‘Reassessing the prospects for a growing block model of the universe’. Next, I review Fine’s reconstruction of McTaggart’s argument and its accompanying three-fold classification of A-theoretic views. I then consider three interpretations of Earman’s growing block model: the (...)
- Time Passages.Miller Kristie - 2017 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 24 (3-4):149-176.Temporal dynamists argue that we should believe that there exists temporal passage because there being passage is the best explanation for the presence of our temporal phenomenology. Some non-dynamists have countered that the presence of passage makes no difference to our temporal phenomenology, and consequently that temporal phenomenology cannot be evidence that there is passage. This paper attempts to bolster this non-dynamist response by offering new arguments for the claim that the presence of passage makes no difference to our phenomenology.
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