No abstract

Different versions of the A‐theory of time (according to which some instant of time is absolutely, objectively present) are traditionally defined in terms of whether everything is present, or whether there are also past and future things. In this paper I argue that the traditional way of defining A‐theories should be abandoned. I focus on the traditional definition of presentism, according to which always, everything is present (§2). First, I argue that there are good reasons to reject all the most plausible interpretations of the predicate ‘is present’ as it appears in the traditional definition of presentism (§3). It follows that there are also good reasons to reject the most plausible interpretations of the traditional definitions of the other A‐theories. I then argue that there is a better way of defining the A‐theories, in terms of the question of whether existence has a beginning and an end (§4). Finally, I argue that what goes for the traditional definition of presentism goes for the traditional definition of its modal analogue actualism, according to which necessarily, everything is actual (§5): there are good reasons to reject the traditional definition of actualism in favour of a definition in terms of contingent existence.

Presentism is typically characterised as the thesis that everything (unre-strictedly

According to the A-theory of time some instant of time is absolutely present. Many reject the A-theory on the grounds that it is inconsistent with current spacetime physics, which appears to leave no room for absolute presentness. However, some reject the A-theory on purely philosophical grounds. In this article I describe three purely philosophical arguments against the A-theory and show that there are plausible A-theoretic responses to each of them. I conclude that, whatever else is wrong with the A-theory, it is not obviously a philosophically suspect theory.

There is a widespread assumption that B-theorists—according to whom there is no fundamental distinction between present and non-present times—should interpret tense operators such as ‘It was the case that’ and ‘It will be the case five minutes hence that’ as implicit quantifier-restrictors, so that (for example) an utterance at the present time n of the sentence ‘It was the case that there are dinosaurs’ is true just in case there are dinosaurs located at some time t earlier than n. However, it is easy to show that this interpretation of the tense operators causes problems for B-theorists when combined with certain other natural B-theoretic commitments. In this paper, I argue that a good way for B-theorists to avoid these problems is to treat the tense operators as redundant when the sentences in their scope are qualitative—that is, not about any particular individual(s).