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Recent times have been very much focussed on the future. The election of Barack Obama in America was accompanied by a wave of optimism. The Global Financial Crisis and the challenge of Climate Change cause many to descend into pessimism. It is not whether our glass is half-empty or half-full that we worry about, but whether it will be empty or full. As philosophers, naturally, we want to illuminate such concerns, so that we might understand them better and subject them to rational scrutiny.According to the Growing-Block view of time, most famously put forward by C.D. Broad [1923], the flow of time consists in events coming into existence, so that past things and events are real, while future things and events are not. While the Growing-Block view is often considered intuitively appealing, some are concerned it has little to say about the future it denies the existence of. We show how Growing-Block theorists can assign meaningful, mind-independent truth conditions to sentences about the future. Introducing the Growing Block TheoryAsymmetries between past and future abound. The past, many of us think, is fixed and determinate; the future is open and indeterminate. The arrows of time and causation point from past to future, not from future to past.The Growing-Block view explains the difference between the fixed past and the open future in terms of ontological commitment: the view is committed to the (tenseless) existence of past objects and events, but not to the (tenseless) existence of future objects or events. It treats the present like the past, not like the future: present things are the last things the Growing-Block theory takes seriously.The commitments of the Growing-Block theory change-or more precisely, increase-as time passes. Though the Growing-Block theory takes only the past and present seriously, it holds that in time, there will be more to the past and present, because more will have happened, even though the events

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Ascriptions of mental states to oneself and others give rise to many interesting logical and semantic problems. This problem presents an original account of mental state ascriptions that are made using intensional transitive verbs such as ‘want’, ‘seek’, ‘imaginer’, and ‘worship’. This book offers a theory of how such verbs work that draws on ideas from natural language semantics, philosophy of language, and aesthetics.