Fine's McTaggart, Temporal Passage, and the a Versus B‐debate

Abstract

I offer an interpretation and a partial defense of Kit Fine's 'Argument from Passage', which is situated within his reconstruction of McTaggart's paradox. Fine argues that existing A-theoretic approaches to passage are no more dynamic, i.e. capture passage no better, than the B-theory. I argue that this comparative claim is correct. Our intuitive picture of passage, which inclines us towards A-theories, suggests more than coherent A-theories can deliver. In Finean terms, the picture requires not only Realism about tensed facts, but also Neutrality, i.e. the tensed facts not being 'oriented towards' one privileged time. However unlike Fine, and unlike others who advance McTaggartian arguments, I take McTaggart's paradox to indicate neither the need for a more dynamic theory of passage nor that time does not pass. A more dynamic theory is not to be had: Fine's 'non-standard realism' amounts to no more than a conceptual gesture. But instead of concluding that time does not pass, we should conclude that theories of passage cannot deliver the dynamicity of our intuitive picture. For this reason, a B-theoretic account of passage that simply identifies passage with the succession of times is a serious contender.

Dynamic absolutism and qualitative change

“…2 In their (2011), Correia and Rosenkranz use the label absolutist anti-recurrentism for this view. 3 For critical discussion of Fine's argument, see Deng (2012), Tallant (2013), Cameron (2015: 86-102), Lipman (2015), Savitt (2016), Loss (2017Loss ( , 2018, and Deasy (2018). 4 Cf.…”

Presentism and Temporal Experience

“…Second, one might wonder whether presentism has the tools to account for any form of objective temporal passage. See, for example, Fine (2005) and Deng (2013b) for discussion. 26 The term "specious" points to the fact that the experienced or phenomenal present deviates from the objective present by having temporal depth, whereas the latter is standardly taken to be durationless.…”

Philosophical Arguments Against the A‐Theory

“…Deng () attributes the following argument to Fine (): there is a certain intuitive picture of the passage of time that the block A‐theory fails to capture. The B‐theory also fails to capture this picture.…”

“…However, some theorists also reject the A‐theory on purely philosophical grounds: they hold that the A‐theory can be shown to be false without appeal to physics. In this article, I describe three such ‘purely philosophical’ arguments against the A‐theory: McTaggart's (, ) famous argument that the A‐theory is contradictory; Fine's () interesting but little‐discussed argument that the A‐theory is consistent with time's being ‘frozen’; and Deng's () recent argument that the A‐theory fails to capture the intuitive picture of the passage of time. I show that there are plausible A‐theoretic responses to each of these arguments, and conclude that, whatever else is wrong with the A‐theory, it is not obviously a philosophically suspect theory.…”