Time

Abstract

There is, at present, a lot of varied and interesting work being done in the philosophy of time; too much for me to fully engage with all of it here. I will focus on three debates that have been particularly busy over the last few years: how do presentists ground true propositions about the past? How does time pass? How do we experience time’s passing? I’ll take these in order. Presentists think that only present objects exist. The view is described in the literature as being commonsensical and intuitive.1 Indeed, that presentism is commonsensical and intuitive is sometimes taken to play a substantial role in motivating it. There is (so it is claimed) a similarly intuitive view of how propositions get to be true. Roughly, the thought is that propositions depend for their truth on what exists. This can get fleshed out in a number of ways: as the thought that truth supervenes on being; as the thesis that every proposition has a truthmaker – an existing entity that ‘grounds’ its truth – and so on. In what follows, I will assume truthmaker theory as it makes for a cleaner exposition, in my view.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 22 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.