Fragmenting Reality: An Essay on Passage, Causality and Time Travel

In this book, we develop a fragmentalist theory of time, which we call Flow Fragmentalism, and then explore its ramifications in a number of philosophical topics. In Chapter 1, after presenting the view, we argue that it offers an explanation of the passage of time that is unavailable to standard tense realism, and it is thus more effective than the latter in vindicating the inherent dynamism of reality. Chapter 2 presents a branching-time version of Flow Fragmentalism, in which a genuine form of openness of the future is vindicated. We argue that the view retains all the benefits of what we call ontological and topological openness. In Chapter 3, we provide a fragmentalist theory of causation, comparing and contrasting it with Humean reductionism about laws of nature. Chapter 4 develops a relativistic version of Flow Fragmentalism and then discusses its advantages over Fine’s version. Chapter 5 concludes the book by discussing how to understand time travel within the flow fragmentalist framework.