Preface
Philosophical problems arise when we try to understand the fundamental features of experience. One of the most basic experiences, and certainly one that has led to considerable philosophical perplexity, is that of time. This experience is reflected in such statements as “I can’t wait until the Matisse exhibit opens,” “Hurrah, I am finally graduating,” “Thank goodness the exam is over!” “Here today, gone tomorrow,” “Time heals all wounds,” and the like. These expressions convey the flow, or passage, of time; the experience, or “perception,” of events moving from the future into the present and then receding from the present into the more and more distant past. It is hard to think of a more familiar experience than temporal passage or temporal becoming. If time heals all wounds, it is because, with its passing, various present sorrows, frustrations, feelings of loss, and other unpleasant experiences recede into the past and, in so doing, fade in strength, if not in effect. To anticipate with eagerness the beginning of the Matisse exhibit is to look forward to opening day moving from the distant to the near future and from the near future to the present, the lived moment of the NOW.
Philosophers who have reflected on the experience of temporal passage and the concepts of past, present, and future have become puzzled, and it is easy to see why. Consider, for example, the birth of my first grandchild. Since that event is in the relatively distant future, it does not yet exist. Nevertheless, it will (I hope) eventually take place—that is, the event in question will come into existence. Subsequently, the event will cease to exist as it recedes into the past. It would thus appear that the passage of time involves events moving from the nonexistent future to the existing present to the nonexistent past. But if the future does not exist, how can it become present? How can what is not become what is How can something (the present) come from nothing (the future), and what is (the present) become what is not (the past)? Questions like these have led some people to wonder how our experience of time could ever reflect the real nature of time.
To think of time as involving the concepts of past, present, and future gives rise to further questions. Augustine believed that neither future nor past but only the present exists or is real. But what is the present? If it is temporally extended, if it has any duration, then it can be divided into a nonexistent future and a nonexistent past. Thus the present must be a moment without extension. But how can the essence of time consist in a temporally unextended point? How can the durational aspect of real time be built up from past, present, and future?
Perhaps the most difficult problem facing those who seek to understand the experience of time is that of temporal passage itself. The notion of “passage” is essentially a spatial one. We speak of a quarterback passing a football through the air or of a train passing through a town. In these instances, as in many others, passage is understood in terms of movement through space. Thus something passes through space by being at different places at different times. But what sense can be made of the idea of the movement of time itself? Can time itself, or the events that occur in time, pass from one time to another? What might this mean? How could it be true?
Some of those who have thought about these questions have maintained that past, present, and future are real, do all exist, but that they differ in their temporal characteristics, or properties. Thus it has been argued that pastness, presentness, and futurity are nonrelational properties which events possess and that the passage of time consists in events changing with respect to these properties. In this way, temporal becoming, or passage, is taken to be a species of qualitative change. Just as an apple can change from green to red, so an apple’s being green can change from being in the future to being in the present.
The analogy of temporal passage to qualitative change can help us, but only up to a point. Things change through time, but to suppose that time itself changes through time is circular. What is this time through which time moves? It is clear that we experience the passage of time, and some languages certainly reflect this by their use of tenses. But could our experience be deceiving us? Is it possible that the most pervasive aspect of our experience of ourselves and the world is an illusion? Could it be that time does not really pass, that time is unreal, and that all tensed judgments are false? The goal of a sound philosophy of time is to avoid such a conclusion by rendering the phenomena in question comprehensible. Moreover, in seeking to elaborate an adequate philosophy of time, we will need to consider another familiar feature of our experience of time, namely, that of succession. We experience time as involving not only passage but also succession. To say that time involves succession means that we experience events as occurring one after another, as temporally related. My typing on the computer keyboard is (roughly) simultaneous with the letters appearing on the screen, and the words themselves occur on the screen in succession, one after the other. But what metaphysical reality underlies our experience of succession? Does that experience depend on our experience of the transitory aspect of time (temporal passage), or does our experience of temporal passage depend on our experience of succession (temporal relations)? Or are both experiences equally fundamental and distinct? After all, it could be that each reflects some basic truth about the nature of temporal reality.
One way in which philosophers of time have approached these questions is through a consideration of the language of time. Many of them have argued that if we can determine what we mean or intend to express by the use of temporal language, then we will have an accurate picture of what reality must be like if our words and thoughts about time are to be true. Does our use of tensed language (which reflects temporal passage), as in the sentence “It is now 1994,” depend, metaphysically speaking, on our use of tenseless language (which reflects temporal relations), as in the sentence “1994 is later than 1993; or does our use of tensed language capture an aspect of time that cannot be captured by tenseless language? It used to be thought that the question as to whether tensed discourse could be translated into tenseless discourse determined which theory of time is true. But there has been a reaction to this way of thinking, the outcome of which is a new tenseless theory of time, and it is this that constitutes the subject of this book.
The aim of these prefatory remarks is not to answer any of the questions raised, but rather to set the stage for the essays that follow, all of which, in one way or another, seek to make the experience of time intelligible and the language of time true. The essays in this volume contain most of the principal contributions to the new tenseless theory of time since its development in the early 1980s. In addition, there are several new essays by Smith and one by Oaklander. Together, they present the latest development in a philosophical debate between the tensed and the tenseless theories of time that is still ongoing.
The book is divided into three parts. Part I is devoted to the role (or lack of it) of language in the debate between these two fundamentally different ways of viewing time: the theory that takes earlier than, later than, and simultaneity as fundamental and the theory that takes the transitory temporal properties of pastness, presentness, and futurity as fundamental. Part II focuses on the logical difficulties inherent in what the defender of the tensed theory of time, perhaps prejudiciously, calls the “commonsense conception of time.” Here what many have considered to be the strongest argument against the tensed theory—McTaggart’s paradox—is debated. Part III returns to the nature of our experience of time. It is this that provides the defender of the tensed theory with perhaps the strongest argument against the tenseless theory. For, allegedly, the defender of the tenseless theory cannot explain the presence of experience and the experience of temporal passage. Here, as in the preceding parts, the reader is left to decide whether the theory being criticized is adequately defended against the objections raised.
The importance of the debate can hardly be overestimated, given the role played by time in numerous other philosophical issues. Not only is the problem of time profound and fascinating in its own right, it is one whose understanding and resolution is central to other philosophical questions of perennial interest. In the Introduction Quentin Smith will consider just some of the ways in which the debate between the tensed and the tenseless theories of time is related to other philosophical problems.
We have not included a bibliography, since virtually all of the recent work in the areas covered in this book is cited in the introductions and chapters. Nevertheless, we have included a Name Index, which can serve as an aid to identif reference material. For recent bibliographies on the debate between tensed and tenseless theories of time, as well as closely related issues, see the extensive bibliographies found in D. H. Mellor, Real Time (Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); David Farmer, Being in Time (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1990); Robin Le Poidevin, Change, Cause and Contradiction: A Defence of the Tenseless Theory of Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and L. Nathan Oaklander and Quentin Smith, Time, Change and Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1995), as well as the references in Quentin Smith, Language and Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), and L. Nathan Oaldander, Temporal Relations and Temporal Becoming: A Defense of a Russellan Theory of Time (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984).
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