Abstract
The hyper-Russellian skeptic is someone who thinks that only one of all your experiences was, is, and will ever be conscious. Which one? The very one you are having now. Before you were always a zombie, and you will be a zombie for ever after. In the present literature on the metaphysics of passage of time, there is disagreement on whether our feeling that time passes — the “dynamic flavor” of our ordinary experience — provides support to the A-theory, that is, the thesis that the passage of time is an objective feature of reality. Lately, several philosophers have argued against this idea. In this paper I want to push this line of reasoning further by exploiting the hyper-Russellian scenario against the A-theory of time.
Acknowledgements
For useful comments, thanks to an anonymous referee and to the people at the Center for Philosophy of Time for useful comments. Thanks to the project 2015-0746 (15-5-3007000-601) of Fondazione Cariplo and Regione Lombardia, and project 15-6-3007000-2021 of Università degli Studi di Milano for financial supports.
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