According to the B‐theory, the passage of time is an illusion. The B‐theory therefore requires an explanation of this illusion before it can be regarded as fully satisfactory; yet very few B‐theorists have taken up the challenge of trying to provide one. In this paper I take some first steps toward such an explanation by first making a methodological proposal, then a hypothesis about a key element in the phenomenology of temporal passage. The methodological proposal focuses on the representational content of the element of experience by virtue of which time seems to pass. The hypothesis involves the claim that the experience of change involves the representation of something enduring, rather than perduring, through any change.

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It is usually taken for granted that we could experience the passage of time. Since it seems to us that we experience the passage of time it is therefore assumed that we have prima facie reason to believe that time passes. But this is false; the passage of time could not be an object of experience because it could not cause, shape or influence temporal experience in any way. After explaining each premise of the argument I discuss several objections that are likely to be raised. I also discuss some related epistemic arguments against the passage of time given by Huw Price and David BraddonMitchell along with objections raised against them by Tim Maudlin and Peter Forrest respectively.

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I offer a new approach to the increasingly convoluted debate between the A‐ and B‐theories of time (the ‘tensed’ and ‘tenseless’ theories). It is often assumed that the B‐theory faces more difficulties than the A‐theory in explaining the apparently tensed features of temporal experience. I argue that the A‐theory cannot explain these features at all, because on any physicalist or supervenience theory of the mind, in which the nature of experience is fixed by the physical state of the world, the tensed properties of time posited by the A‐theory could play no role in shaping temporal experience. It follows that the A‐theory is false; even a priori arguments for it fail, because they still require the tensed vocabulary which is used to describe temporal experience.