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Views
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Cite
Cite
Barry Lee, The Nature of Time, The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 65, Issue 258, January 2015, Pages 116–120, https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqu060
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Extract
Meyer offers an intriguing account of time, advocating a ‘modal’ approach—making essential use of irreducible tense operators—but, in contrast with many other modal theorists, rejecting presentism and characterizing his view as eternalist. Further, he holds that standard sorts of modal theory—which try to get by without (non-present) times—face severe difficulties in accounting for the truth conditions of sentences of a number of problematic kinds, and he tries to address these problems by appeal to ersatz times, roughly analogous to the linguistic ersatzer's possible worlds. Meyer's proposal is ingeniously constructed and defended, but—I think—faces a number of difficulties.
In his first chapter, Meyer contrasts modal with ‘spatial’ views that treat time as analogous to space. Two varieties of spatial view are distinguished: relationist, with times accounted for in terms of temporal relations between other kinds of item, and substantivalist, according to which there is a manifold of ‘metaphysically basic’ times. Modal views offer a radical alternative, seeing the time series as a ‘logical space … occupied by sentences or propositions, rather than a geometric space … populated by material objects or events’ (p. 3). Meyer provides arguments against relationist and substantivalist views in chapters two and three. I don't have space to discuss these, but it is worth noting that Meyer says his only reason for rejecting temporal parts variants of these views is that they compare poorly with modal accounts in terms of complexity and ontological cost (see pp. 23 and 28)—I'll return to this.